It’s S’more Than All That: Gender Benders and the Creation of Feminist Community at USCB

On the bathroom walls of our campus hang small posters advertising campus events; there’s an arts and crafts series, an event for making sugar scrub, soap, and lip balm, an Oreo stacking contest, a trip to play paintball at a local arena, and a s’more making party. What we longed for we couldn’t find—a place standing at the intersection of academic affairs and student life, a site for deepening and extending challenging and intriguing classroom conversations on hot topics while offering something fun and enjoyable. So, we built it. We tried to remind ourselves, “If you build it, they will come.” And, come they do. Every month, we host what we affectionately call a gender party.

In mid-August 2012, Deborah Cohan came to the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) to assume a position in sociology and met the department chairperson, who mentioned that she would probably really like Kimberly Cavanagh, the newly hired anthropologist. A few days later, we found ourselves seated next to each other at the first department² meeting of the semester and our chair introduced us as Kim Cohan and Deb Cavanagh. At the time, we had no idea how prophetic that linguistic intertwining really was. The following day we were at a new faculty orientation; after the long lunch, we found ourselves standing up talking for what became hours. This was to be the first of many lingering conversations exploring the contours of pedagogy and the personal.

What quickly emerged in those early conversations was our mutual interest in film. Further, we both craved an environment in which we could deepen and extend the conversations we were each having with our students in our classrooms, and simultaneously we wanted to see and experience each other in action dealing with these issues along with the fascinating and intense moments that often emerge in teaching challenging and controversial topics. Intuitively, we were aware that we shared a similar sensibility for thinking about gender, intersectionality, and pedagogical issues. Throughout our first semester, we were continually struck by the number of students who were simultaneously enrolled in both of our classes—Kim’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and Deb’s Introductory Sociology—who remarked to us about how what they were learning in one class reverberated in the other. Using process goals that exemplify feminist pedagogy (Schniedewind; Webb, Allen, and Walker), we both strive to develop an atmosphere of respect, trust, and community, share leadership, employ cooperative structure, and integrate cognitive and affective learning with action.

Given the nature of our meandering conversations, one thing led to another, and pretty soon we were onto the idea of launching an interdisciplinary set of events that would move these feminist pedagogy process goals beyond our classrooms (De Welde et al.). In December 2012, we met over a sushi lunch to celebrate the end of the semester and to brainstorm how we might together deepen and extend our respective gender-specific classes for spring 2013. On paper napkins, we scribbled how we would go about collaboratively creating a monthly campus series that we eventually came to title “Gender Benders: Conversations on Gender and Sexuality from an Interdisciplinary Perspective.” We decided we would screen films, organize lectures, and coordinate panels to talk about gender among faculty, staff, students, community agencies, and community members.

Since spring 2013, we have planned events around the following topics: exploring multiple meanings of gender, issues of LGBTQ identity and community, masculinity and disability, cancer and social movements, what it means to be an ally, sexual violence in the military, parenting, cross-cultural issues related to gender, women in sports, media representation, mental health and wellness, leadership, hook-up culture, and men and feminism.

Here we will discuss the promises and pitfalls of planning and coordinating this type of feminist, interdisciplinary, extra-curricular, and academically engaging series—previously all but absent on this campus—and how going about this is related to resources, politics, participatory pedagogy, community building, and knowledge production. Mindful of...