Gender and Sexuality in the Prison Classroom

This page aims to help raise awareness and possible considerations for teaching and engaging students in sex and gender segregated spaces (and for teaching about and discussing the topics of sex and gender within the curriculum), while recognizing that sex, gender, and sexuality based oppressions reveal themselves in uniquely pointed ways within such spaces.

Thoughtful Dialogue On Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Teaching about (often socially contentious) subjects like sex and gender, especially in diverse, trauma-informed environments like prison classrooms, compels us to consider all of the drastically different ways that different cultures — including our own — have interpreted sex and gender over countless generations. For instance, is it still considered and revered as "masculine" in American culture to sport powdered wigs, heels, and stockings? Rather, why do considerations for masculine or feminine appearance clearly change over time and across cultures?

Teaching these subjects, or even just addressing them for the purposes of teaching seemingly unrelated lessons, also compels us to recognize how there have always been innumerable human beings who are intersex, neither distinctly physiologically discernible as male nor female. The plain and historically well-documented reality that the human experience has never been exclusively lived according to a reproductive sexual binary, while in contrast to some strong cultural, religious, and other ideological sentiments, also effectively erodes the expectation that gendered expression must, itself, reinforce a sex-based gendered binary.

In other words, it's hard to expect people to conform to specific standards of appearance and behavior based on their sex assigned at birth, when specific standards for appearance and behavior based on sex have never been completely fixed in place or time.

We can aim to recognize and communicate about key differences between the effort to expand our understanding of the expression of gender — as a richly diverse range of human experiences — as compared with our own personal patterns of gendered expression, sexuality, and so on. That is to say, lessons covering these topics should clearly communicate that one is not being distinctly asked or required (neither student nor teacher) to simply nor forcibly change how we each view our own unique identities, in particular as they/we relate to expressions and manifestations of sex, gender, and sexuality.

We might instead explicitly communicate that the very point of teaching and learning respectfully about these subjects from diverse perspectives (diversity of course content as well as diversity of contributing voices within and beyond the classroom), may simply be that we extend to others the same respectful considerations we hope (or expect) are available to us. Fully respecting others, especially and in part by fully respecting the distances between our own lived experiences and theirs, need not involve compromising important, personally held beliefs.

Our role as educators cannot be to impose specific beliefs or perspectives, or to require certain beliefs and perspectives be simply parroted or regurgitated in order to pass or succeed in a course. We can emphasize instead the larger societal role of higher education, and with that our particular mandate as college educators to teach and assess critical reasoning: to expand our objective understanding of the world in order to, at the very least, inclusively respect how and why other human beings — with other human experiences — differ from us, and what we might potentially learn from those differences.

Learning Experiences Centering Gender and Sexuality

We live now in a more openly, sexually diverse society at large, as do our students who are incarcerated. Discourses on gender and sexuality already occur throughout the carceral setting, as they do across all factions of society at large, regardless of whether these subjects are brought up for formal discussion or learning within the carceral classroom, or within your particular coursework.

Our students form, negotiate, and debate their own opinions, observations, and analyses around all manner of socially salient subjects. Communication about socially salient subjects like gender and sexuality occurs not only in response to but in spite of the ways in which contentious topics and adverse experiences are addressed, framed, and mainstreamed throughout different forms media. For our students in carceral spaces, access to the broader mainstream media, and access to more particular tools and platforms like social media and streaming services may range from extremely limited to entirely nonexistent across different facilities.

Incarcerated students typically have some limited access to Television, News, and Film media. We should note here that many people who are not incarcerated actually tend to self-restrict their own media access to a range of subjects and viewpoints expressed through certain platforms; people do this by selectively and/or exclusively following subjects and opinions they already like and agree with, and conversely by ignoring those opinions with which they already have an established negative bias. In other words, for virtually all of us, media content provides only a limited view of changes and developments across culture, society, and public discourse.

Underscoring the importance of recognizing and treating each class as a unique co-learning experience, it is critical to remind ourselves that the institutional erasure of our students' and other incarcerated persons' individuality — the cell-blocked commodifying uniformity uniquely and inhumanely applied to the conditions of mass incarceration — has the potential to muddy and filter our own attempts at bracketing/recognizing/resisting/rejecting bias.

Inclusively Teaching Sex/Gender/Sexuality

The opportunity to engage with, respectfully question, and therefore learn from one another is especially apparent in any course explicitly addressing (or teaching about) the topics of sex, gender, and sexuality. Today, this can include a broad range of courses that students will almost inevitably take in order to complete their general education requirements. Public Speaking classes, for instance, teach about gender and sexuality as a matter of audience awareness and cultural respect. Sociology, Philosophy, and Lifelong Learning courses similarly address these subjects as socially and historically relevant topics.

Regardless of the disciplines we teach, students completing a college degree will unavoidably encounter these subjects and discussions, and carry with them into every new class the perspectives they acquire and/or learn about. Whereas many Mathematics and Science courses, for instance, may not explicitly address such subject matter, educators should be aware of how lessons on gender and sexuality may inform, or even challenge, how our students engage with us or with the class.

Society's relationship with the subjects of sex and gender can be/has been contentious. One such contention is some factions' and individuals' dissent over the (separation of the) definitions of "sex" and "gender" to recognize "gender" as a matter of outward expression and internal identity, differing across cultures and individuals; and "sex" as a matter of physical sex characteristics, such as genitalia, often identified as symbolic references used for interpreting differing and sometime competing understandings of gender(ed expression).

Accordingly and critically, then, we must also recognize that many of our students, regardless of how they identify themselves, live (or have lived through) many of the same adversities as people who are LGBTQ+ across society have experienced (and still do), but with a significantly greater likelihood that such identities and experiences are not made frequently prominent parts of a person's public identity within a carceral space.

Again, we are potentially present for only a small part of students’ discourses and reflections on topics like gender and sexuality, subjects frequently dismissed in many settings as socially taboo, scorned as abhorrent, or obscured through unchallenged (often pathologizing) stereotypes. Consequently, any role we may play facilitating and guiding dialogue around the subjects of sex, gender, and sexuality should effectively focus on: First, distinguishing the concrete variables that make human gender and sexuality complex and diverse in the first place (differences across time and culture, nuances and complexities in human development continually being discovered, etc.); Then, reconciling this diversity of differences with the formations of our own worldviews (critically thinking about why we think differently than others) as we proceed with teaching and learning alongside our students.

In other words: Acknowledge and address objective, verifiable information (historical record and up-to-date research), rather than relying on conjecture or personal opinion when trying to make a point or guide a conversation on these socially salient, individually meaningful subjects. Throughout these and other critical conversations, students frequently emphasize the importance of continually (re)learning our own cultural conditioning as individuals — that is, relearning how we have come to form the views and practices we maintain, and how our experiences have facilitated our treatment of ourselves, our treatment of our environment over time, and vice versa.

Intentional Insights: Health and Sense of Self

A Communication Studies faculty's perspective. Whether or not we think about it all the time, often, or much at all, we all experience and carry with us the realities of gender that have been socially enforced in any number of ways around us. We’re likely all fairly familiar with the experience of violating someone else’s expectations for ways we ought to outwardly perform our gender — dressing, sitting, gesturing, vocalizing, glancing the “wrong” way, etc. And we are likely as familiar with the sequences of social punishment that tend to follow — everything from ridicule, to isolation and ostracization, to irreparable emotional and physical inflictions.

Further, to some extent I would argue we are all familiar with the act of bending and twisting our outward performances in ways we hope will satisfy others’ apparent expectations for how we "ought to" present ourselves publicly. We may craft a style of preferences and personality within the parameters of those expectations, but without a doubt, in some way or another, most of us have felt we have had to express our gender in a certain (and seemingly predetermined) way in order to avoid very real/material consequences.

As a Gay/Queer man raised in a community prominently built on cornerstones of “traditional” values, I am well aware of what it feels like to enter and move through environments concentrating more socially acceptable forms of masculinity, those which portray "traditionally acceptable" heterosexual tendencies, often by outwardly expressing heterosexual desires in any number of culturally affirming fashions. I know, from experience, for example, that I will get certain looks for dressing (or failing to dress) certain ways as someone with a masculine-presenting body. In particular, blending masculine and feminine features in my apparel and appearance recurringly results in what I recognize as “nasty” looks that, especially in my youth, were often followed by equally nasty comments, and not-infrequently followed by physical altercations.

Three lessons I try to carry with me as someone with these experiences regularly teaching and building relationships within a prison setting are:

First, while, yes, I am unavoidably aware of the fact that the men’s prison is an environment in which various (and sometimes conflicting) views and values favoring certain forms of masculinity are often highly concentrated, I am also aware — and feel every educator should be aware — that all realities of this environment are far more important and prominent for our students’ immediate and ongoing experiences than our own. After all, we enter and we exit the carceral classroom on a regular basis, whereas our students live and reside in a fully regulated and insulated carceral society within the facility.

Second, on a human level, as I strive to sustain and show respect for my students as individuals, my students in the prison have always returned my respect, and honored my humanity along with the basic professional parameters guiding our relationship as teacher and student, and as one collective class.

Lastly, I learned throughout my own educational experiences that sometimes the most manageable way to feel comfortable in a more “traditionally” masculine space is to strategically/selectively adapt my appearance and behavior to more closely suit the norms of that space.

Yet, interestingly, when preparing to go into the prison, or while I’m there, I find myself encountering much clearer, more deliberately maintained and outwardly performed expressions of “hard” masculinity from a statistically greater ratio of correctional officers, than I do from students and others incarcerated. In other words, the strategic adapting I do in the form of deliberately but thoughtfully minimizing certain feminine-presenting features and preferences for appearance (e.g., hiding or choosing not to style my long hair), while possibly having an initial effect on my rapport-building with students, is much more about attending to the expectations for masculinity behaviorally sustained within the overall environment, in order to acquire a necessary level of personal comfort to perform my role as instructor, professionally and effectively.

Every instructor approaches this kind of strategic adapting as a sequence of personal choices — because admittedly, in any environment, as is certainly true for our students on an ongoing basis, and especially true for our carceral-impacted students, overtly adapting to the unending expectations of other people can take a serious toll on one’s health, mental health, and stable sense of self.