Negotiating Binary Conceptions of Sex/Gender in a Multi-Gender World: Response to ‘The Challenge of Same-Sex Provision: How Many Girls Does a Girls’ School Need?’

Commentary on Renz

"Safe Space"

In recognizing the classroom as a space of vulnerability, the concept of “safe space” has proven helpful yet also potentially problematic. Because what is safe for some is certainly not for others and because “safety” can be a privilege to which not all have access, can safe spaces exist? This chapter interrogates what is at stake in this pedagogical concept, asking: What are our responsibilities as queer educators in creating certain types of environments? In queer pedagogy, should we be wary of a discourse of “safety” that may feed into neoliberal focuses on security and surveillance? What tools can we use to challenge this rhetoric while maintaining a focus on the politics of speaking and being heard within both educational institutions and queer communities

Postcolonial Memory, Masculinity, and Film: Alain Resnais’s Absent Muriel

This essay analyses Muriel (1963), the third feature-length film from Alain Resnais, which attempts to make sense of a fragmented past and present that have been torn apart by international wars and domestic conflicts. The film highlights the multitude of silences and amnesias surrounding the French–Algerian War and its remembrances (or lack thereof) as the nation struggled to come to terms with colonial guilt. After mapping out the ways in which representations of destruction and rebuilding around both the French–Algerian War and the Second World War inform Muriel, the essay goes on to examine how form and content subtly reveal memory and masculinity as being tied up in this postwar, postcolonial identity crisis, exemplified by the visual absence of Muriel, an Algerian woman who was tortured and killed by a French Army unit during the war. Although the torture scene is not represented visually, its haunting presence exemplifies how the Algerian female body functioned as a screen onto which French men could project their anxieties around colonial power and masculinity. While the visual absence of torture and the title character is a glaring omission, it is one that could be also interpreted as obliquely addressing issues at the heart of the Franco-Algerian conflict, including censorship, torture and war crimes

Negotiating Binary Conceptions of Sex/Gender in a Multi-Gender World

Commentary on Renz