Greg Knotts:
“Sexually Stigmatized Communities” is a thoughtful, comprehensive approach to reducing heterosexism and homophobia through an engaging curriculum. It is organized as a training manual and successfully offers a variety of modifications for any number of settings that would be interested in offering workshops or classes in order to reduce heterosexism and/or homophobia in their respective environments. The manual is a compilation of teaching materials, classroom activities and handouts of various kinds.
Stewart has thoroughly amassed what amounts to be “sufficient materials for a semester-long college course” and offers a variety of options in amending the material to fit the needs of various groups in terms of time allotment and the needs of the organizers, instructors or participants (p. xii). Stewart cautions, “conducting workshops on sexual orientation is often emotionally stressful” and “participants typically are highly adversarial” (p. xiii). A training manual like this one contributes to a thorough understanding of heterosexism and homophobia and, used correctly, could help alleviate that kind of discrimination from a variety of settings.
“Most organizations agree that education about cultural difference is important; however, very few have performed an analysis of existing programs and seldom have any published their findings” (p. 1).
Stewart offers that analysis and researches various kinds of training workshops that have been utilized in corporate, government and educational settings. He discovers that that there has been a lack of goals for most existing training workshops. If there are goals at all, he says they are typically “broad, sociologically based, and unmeasureable” (p. 2). Stewart discusses the various incarnations of ‘cultural awareness’ and the difficulty in bringing these kinds of workshops to a particular environment. The difficulties range from the perception of the training from the participants, to the title of the training, to the commitment and attitude of the sponsoring organization. Often the perception of participants is that cultural awareness trainings are “imposed on them by outside political pressures” and there is little attempt to grasp the “feelings, attitudes and organizational culture” of the participants themselves making the trainings seem generic and not relevant (p. 3).
Often cultural awareness trainings are billed as ‘sensitivity’ issues and this title alone “sends [the participants] the message that they are viewed as insensitive,” thus starting most of these kinds of trainings out on a hostile foot (p. 3). The worst problem, perhaps, is the “across-the-board lack of clarity regarding which groups and topics should be covered within cultural awareness training, as well as an absence of effective self-evaluation processes to help an organization make such strategic decisions” (p. 4).
“Sexually Stigmatized Communities” is a manual for those organizations that have designated sexual minorities as a culture in need of awareness. Stewart’s manual is based in a Humanistic Psychological pedagogy that asserts “the acquisition of new information and the personalizing of this information” is at the core of the learning process (p. 8). In this Humanistic perspective “teachers need to manifest attitudes and behaviors that learners will want to adopt for themselves,” making the quality of instructors central to the successful acquisition of new knowledge on the part of the learner (p. 9).
Stewart also discusses various theories of Attitude Change and cites Ogbu and others in the lack of continuity and conflict from the literature regarding multicultural education (p. 15). In assembling this manual, Stewart focuses on the construction of meaning and the nature of reality on the part of the participants in creating an effective teaching model. Ultimately, Stewart asserts that the four criteria needed for effective teaching to occur are that the information must be ” comprehensible, meaningful, and modeled by teachers in an authentic manner” (p. 17). Stewart creates a manual that, he says, has “meaning associated with the social obligations [of a given learner] that allows for learning to occur” (p. 18).
One of the most transformative thoughts in this manual is the naming of the training as “sexually stigmatized communities.” Stewart deconstructs how he arrived at the need for this name by tracing a history of ‘socially’ stigmatized communities (racial, ethnic, religious) and then making the leap to include sexual minorities as part of those groups. In order to “reconstruct society away from heterosexism,” (p. 19) Stewart has created a training modeled after the Shively and DeCecco “tri-continua model based on gender identity, social sex-role and sexual orientation” (p. 27).
There are specific suggestions for 2-day, 8-hour, 4-hour and even a 2-hour workshop. It is a matter of combining topics, choosing which materials to use and how much ‘student’ participation an instructor has time for or the drive to incorporate into the workshop. Stewart gives explicit instructions and detailed notes about what is required in order to achieve maximum results in changing the “self-awareness” of the participants regarding these communities (p. 38).
As for the materials themselves, they are extensive, broadly researched, and represent well the various voices in gay studies today. Stewart has created over 100 one to two-page ‘topic papers’ that coalesce major themes into comprehensible input for someone outside of academia. Topics range from the essentialist/social constructionist debate, to definitions of what it means to be in a particular sexually stigmatized community (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex) to gender roles. Authors from Kinsey to Boswell, from Pharr to Blumenfeld, from Mead to Troiden are all included.
Stewart presents papers on the construction of a ‘gay identity,’ on scientific and genetic discussions, and cross-cultural, anthropological investigations. Here, such recognized authors as Herek, Boswell and Williams are cited. There is an entire discussion of sexual acts, legal issues and religious perspectives. There is a thorough treatment of “societal homophobia and the promotion of heterosexism” (182) and in-depth discussions on internalized as well as institutionalized homophobia.
The section on strategies to reduce homophobia is perhaps the most helpful. It stems from a thorough discussion of the “three psychological functions used to maintain prejudice:” experiential-schematic (people relying on previous experience as guide to future behavior); self-expressive (affirmation of existing beliefs by receiving support from others); and defensive (projecting an unacceptable part of the self onto others) (p. 235). Throughout this section, Stewart offers his own opinion papers, as well as those of Nardi, Project 10 in Los Angeles, Lipkin and others. This section is a direct look at how heterosexism is accepted unconsciously by the majority and really helps directly appeal to the ‘self-awareness’ of homophobia that the manual strives to shed light on.
It is the “activities” section, though, that is perhaps the strongest asset of this manual. Here Stewart shares hands-on activities “based on value clarifications techniques” that help participants focus “on the process of valuing instead of specific content” (p. 301). Stewart organizes and creates activities that help ‘students’ evaluate and assess their beliefs. There is a set on prizing, where students can “discover and affirm their existing beliefs,” on choosing, where students become aware that they can “make choices [regarding their own beliefs] and that alternatives can be freely chosen” and on acting, where students “are supported in their attempts to act with consistency on their beliefs” (p. 302).
Each activity is given a purpose or goal, a projected time allotment, material needs and a step-by-step procedure to follow to help ensure maximum effect. There are supplemental materials that go with these activities and very often handouts and transparencies are aligned to help the instructor and participants have the greatest possible positive experience. Stewart makes sure to list a target audience of “adults,” “adolescents,” or both for a given activity, and offers suggestions on how to adapt an activity for more or less higher order thinking depending on the setting.
The greatest strength of this manual is that it is so incredibly comprehensive. There is enough material here for an entire college semester course on human sexuality and the politics of sex. It has specific targets of young adults, university students or adults in corporate climes. This is also, perhaps, its greatest area of challenge. In all of the materials, in all the proposed discussion questions, in all the incredibly crafted hands-on activities, there are no suggestions on how to appropriate this material for the elementary school setting, where children begin to be indoctrinated into the heterosexist, homophobic culture at large.
Stewart creates a manual that can very effectively change attitudes; the manual has a variety of ways to approach people and increase their self awareness about their own homophobic beliefs. What is missing is how to teach children that these beliefs never need be formed in the first place. What is missing is a way to adapt these materials for children who have no attitudes to change, and could possibly help create new attitudes that would stop homophobia from starting, or the seemingly incessant drive to create a heterosexist society.
Stewart closes the manual by putting his money where his mouth is and providing a ‘class assessment’ to be given to participants after the completion of the workshop. It has a ‘general knowledge test’ that covers facts that had been presented throughout the topic papers; this allows participants to gauge their own self-awareness. There is also an ‘evaluation questionnaire’ that rates the instruction, materials and overall quality of the class; this allows the participants to help raise the self-awareness of the instructor to better the quality of instruction in subsequent workshops. Early on in the manual, Stewart asserts that this training manual should only be used as “one facet of a comprehensive antidiscrimination program and should never be presented as an isolated module” (p. 52). Although educational research supports this statement, I believe that even if this manual was used in isolation, it could not help but raise the self-awareness of everyone involved and start people down the path toward a society free of heterosexist and homophobic attitudes.
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