-
1 Coming Out and Leading Out: Pedagogy Beyond the Closet
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Kathleen M. Sands 1 Coming Out and Leading Out Pedagogy Beyond the Closet THE BIBLE is based on a coming-out story; it’s called the Exodus. The people who came out on that occasion were a motley crew, unified less by blood than by a common, miserable social status. To say that they were chosen for this journey is to admit that they would not have wandered in the wilderness had not circumstance compelled them. But their commitment to freedom was to become a foundational myth of Western culture, a feature of the horizon of every subsequent movement for liberation. As a lesbian teacher and scholar of religious studies, I take comfort in this story because I also find myself in a motley group, one unified not by who its members actually are but by the laws and discourse of others. In the classroom, I would never choose to foreground my sexual preference were it possible simply to speak what I know and present who I am without making the splash called coming out. On reflection, though, I see that my teaching is threaded through with issues that I wish were not there, such as racism, economic exploitation, misogyny, and the decline of the biosphere. The beauty, coherence, and community that I actually want to teach are generally wrought from such crude, unwanted materials. In my own case, what is crude and unwanted is the intensive scrutiny to which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered lives are subjected by the strictures of sexual normality. Discussed and judged, we can either retreat into a doubled silence or take charge of our self-presentation and turn the inquisition into a conversation. Educators are people who lead out, and to lead an exodus, you have to be willing to go on one. So I have moved, rather slowly and with as much company as I could muster, not in the heroic tradition of Moses and other lone rangers, but more like Miriam, who preferred to sing in a group. That this journey would pull me between a rock and a hard place became evident during my very first semester teaching at UMass/Boston seven years ago. I was teaching an introductory course dealing with sev18 eral religious traditions, and I was trying to lead a discussion on “Song of Bear,” a piece of old lore attributed by Ann Cameron to the Nootka women of Vancouver Island. Long ago, the story told, a young woman had left the menstrual hut to bathe in the stream. While she was bathing, she saw a bear watching her from the bank and trembling with desire. She invited the bear to join her for a swim, and afterwards, as they lay in the sun to dry, the bear tearfully confessed, “I love you.” “I love you, too,” the woman replied, but this only made the bear cry harder, because the situation was even worse than it seemed. “I am a female bear,” she finally choked out. The young woman took this in for a minute and then said, “If I can love a creature that looks as different from me as you do, why should I care if you are a male bear or a female bear?” And so, the story concludes, they went up to the bear’s mountain cave, and they loved one another.1 Since this story was one of about twenty in the collection in which it appeared, and since the collection itself was only one book of several in the course, it did not consume much class time. In fact, it consumed almost no time at all, because after a half hour of free-ranging discussion , not one student in our class of forty had made reference to it. Clearly, I thought, this is a hot potato. Finally, so that the piece would not be overlooked entirely, I asked casually whether anyone had noticed the story about the bear and the woman. Some nodding heads, but no comments. I floated a couple of broad questions. “How did you react when you read this story?” No response. “Did it surprise you? Did you find it funny or sad or weird or what?” Still no takers, so I became more directive. “What do you think it suggests about how homoerotic love is seen in this culture? Is it a different attitude than we find in mainstream American culture?” The silence in the room began to buzz loudly. “Have you ever heard the...