VicPride! – Victoria College's LGBTQ Organization

Coverage of the American 2012 campaign so far has been bullshit. For one, there is too much of it. The campaign to be the Republican nomination for president is already well underway a short 13 months before Barack Obama’s re-election. Secondly, the reporting has been awful. In particular, coverage surrounding the only female candidate, Michele Bachmann (Yah, I know, only one “L”.)

Media scrutiny of Bachmann has been extensive. And perhaps rightfully so. As a popular contender for the Republican nomination for president, she could one day single handily destroy the lives of Americans who are not white, rich, hetero, Christian, citizens lead the United States of America. Sadly, as with the coverage of the campaigns of Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the coverage is riddled with sexism.

Many in the more liberal media have not been quick to defend Bachmann. For good reason, her entire campaign is indefensible. Much to my personal delight, making fun of Bachmann and her historical ignorance has, and continues to be, a boon for the 24 hour American media circus. Conservatives argue that the incredible scrutiny placed on Bachmann is, in it self sexist. I do not buy this for one second. The coverage of the male candidates has been equally as harsh when it comes to their gaffes, Bachmann’s are simply more frequent and on a whole different level of gaffe quality. For example, Bachmann has stated that: Jimmy Carter was responsible for the swine flu epidemic in the 80’s, the Founding Fathers worked “tirelessly to end slavery”, and that Paul Revere warned the British of an impending American attack. Oh, and her husband runs a reparative therapy (pray-the-gay-away) clinic. Just sayin’.
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An old teacher of mine recently made me start thinking on my experiences and those of others within the queer community. She used the word ‘homocentric’ to describe the experience of the queer university student, commenting how one might cope with the overwhelming adjustment from the heterosexual matrix, that is most high schools, to more sexually liberal and queered spaces found at the university. Now some may disagree with this assessment, but generally I think we can say that there are more openly queer people and LGBTQ positive spaces at university in comparison to our high schools. By no means am I suggesting that the UofT or any university has made the complete or even a fully adequate transition to complete inclusivity of queer identities. Instead, the purpose of this short rant is simply to question the politics of identity and explore how we might go about making queer spaces more inclusive and accessible to students and people of all gender and sexual identities.
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This year in my Women and Gender Studies class I had to participate in an “extra-curricular gender activity” and write about how it relates to the course and what we were studying – so I decided to write about my experiences with TEACH. If you would like to find out more info about TEACH you can follow this link. http://www.ppt.on.ca/Anti-Homophobia_teach.asp
— Tyler Carson

 

This past fall I began volunteering with the organization Teens Educating and Confronting Homophobia (T.E.A.C.H). The group provides workshops for students, teachers, and professionals around Toronto. These interactive and educational workshops are delivered by queer identified youth from various communities and backgrounds. They are highly pertinent to the course as they are intended to challenge heterosexism, debunk myths surrounding sexuality and raise awareness about the impact of homophobia. Furthermore, homophobia is systemically connected to sexism, a particularly salient area of study in the field of women and gender studies.

After completing nearly forty hours of training, I observed my first T.E.A.C.H workshop. My role was to listen and ideally learn several helpful tricks from experienced facilitators.  I will briefly describe a few of the workshop’s sections and discuss how many of the assigned readings support issues taken up in the workshop. First, we begin with outlining basic sexual and gender identities and definitions, emphasizing that the ways in which heterosexual individuals are attracted to each other are the same as queer identified individuals (emotionally, physically, intellectually, etc).  Similar to Dean Spade in “Undermining Gender Regulation,” we address the regulation of the sex and gender binary, specifically by focussing on how transgendered and transexual people experience discrimination. The facilitator in my session discussed barriers to employment for trans identified people and employed Spade’s example of the difficulty to change an individual’s sex on any piece of government identification (Spade, 2006).
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I know that this is going to seem to stray a bit outside of the scope of this here blog thing but bear with me and I will try to bring it back around. There has been a lot of talk this election season about the supposed “youth apathy” that exists in the Canadian political landscape. Young people have some of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country; I think we land just after those who are in the country illegally but just before the dead in terms of those who vote. I will substantiate that claim with proof at a later date I am sure. As someone who votes left (omg Alex say it aint so! Spoiler alert next time pls!) this is incredibly distressing because I am told that young people tend to vote left which may one day lead to a country lead by a handsome man with a moustache who wants  to sweep me into his big manly arms and carry me off into the sunset…. As is the case in most of my dreams.

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