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30652 - Pedagogical Dirty Work: Lessons about Respectability from Sexualities Studies (Section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology Hans O. Mauksch Address)

Sun, August 10, 12:00 to 1:00pm, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Floor: Lobby Level/Green, Crystal C

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“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” This (wildly inappropriate) question has been directed at me in sexual field sites as part of my ongoing ethnographic work on pleasure. But also, and far too frequently, I am asked this regarding my choice to build my career in teaching sociology at a community college, as this is also ‘not a place that good girls go’. This Mauksch Lecture will address the lessons I’ve learned as a sociologist of sexualities and the ways that respectability is used as a trap to keep the dominant paradigms centered in teaching. There remains stigma for doing both of these sorts of work, which has been more acknowledged outside of the mainstream of the academy than inside our classrooms. This stigma is placed onto instructors by virtue of our identities, knowledge, or comfort with sexual subjects and has unjustly shaped the careers of many scholars, myself included. Studying sex and pleasure has shaped my teaching, in both content and practice. My career choices and classroom teaching have both been influenced by the constant awareness of when and where it was and was not safe to be open about my research on sexuality and embodied pleasures. While not sexual, classroom teaching carries with it intimacies as well, and there is power in seeing and naming the ways we can use sociological knowledge and our sociological imaginations to embolden our students and each other to live and think loudly in a world that wants us to be quiet.

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