Gender, Sexism and Social Activism: A Youth Workshop Resource

A resource for facilitating workshops on 'everyday sexism' has been produced by the Sexual Politics Now project at the University of Auckland.

The workshops draw on a range of critical and embodied techniques to support participants to analyse and 'speak back' to gendered relations of power they may encounter in media and in daily life. They do not deal directly with violence against women but address gender inequity and social norms around gender (e.g. adherence to rigidly defined gender roles and identities) which are risk factors for violence.

Gender, Sexism and Social Activism: A Youth Workshop Resource contains 50 activities and related resources. It lays out the workshops’ theoretical foundations and offers guidelines for facilitation. It outlines three workshop formats: a three-day format, a one-day format and a 90-minute format. All three workshops are structured around growing a critical social analysis and providing participants with critical and practical building blocks to 'speak back' to dominant cultural assumptions.

There are two key aims to each workshop:

1. To explore critical social theory in local context, and
2. To explore possibilities for further action.

In order to achieve these aims, the design and sequencing of activities in each workshop is intended to facilitate participants’ exploration of the following four questions:

1. What have we learned from our social environment about gender, gender relations and sexuality?
2. What are the personal, ethical and political consequences of sexism and prescriptive gender roles?
3. What prevents individuals and groups from challenging injustice?
4. How might we 'speak back' to cultural images and ideas we find troubling?

The workshops were designed for senior high school students: young people between 15 and 19 years old. However author Octavia Calder-Dawe considers that this material has no upper age limit and that some of the activities could be run with any school-age children (e.g. Activity 9: Gender ≠ Genitals) if the content and pitch of activities is adjusted appropriately. Similarly, although the resources were designed as part of an extra-curricular, voluntary gender and sexism workshop, the sessions and activities could inform school curriculum development and may also be useful in classroom teaching across a range of subjects and age groups. The resource may also be of use in University-level teaching, particularly for tutorial design. Elements of the workshops could inform externally delivered school-based, workplace and/or community educational work, particularly anti-discrimination programmes.

The Sexual Politics Now project raises questions about pornography and the sexism, misogyny and racism that shape portrayals of women and men in pornography as well as in wider media and culture.