Gender Issues Today, by Jane Nakagawa (ed.)

Jane Nakagawa (ed.), Gender Issues Today, Tokyo: Tokyo Shuppan Service Center, September 2005. ISBN  4-9902208-8-9  1200 yen.     Reviewed by Bill Templer, Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya, Maifad village, Sikao district, Trang province 92150, Thailand

Jane Nakagawa (Aichi University of Education, Japan) has edited an excellent and highly compact introduction to gender studies for intermediate (B1) EFL students and beyond. It can be used in classes or for self-study anywhere on the planet, though the text is oriented in part with Japanese college students in mind. Jane is an American-born TESOL expert who has lived in Japan since 1989.

The book has 16 brief chapters, each focusing on a specific gender issue, and ranging across many cultures. Each chapter has a single reading of some 300-500 words, written in English readily comprehensible to lower-intermediate students, with discussion and comprehension questions on the reading, along with supplementary often very inventive activities. A total of some 170 more specialized key words specific to the gender-analysis focus have been highlighted as they occur at the beginning of each chapter. The text lends itself well to group work in a collaborative classroom setting.  The authors also remind students that some issues here are highly ‘sensitive,’ so they should be careful about how they formulate questions to ask other students in class or a survey.

The 12 contributing authors have attempted to relate their chapters to encouraging students to think about gender, its politics and practical construction in their own lives and cultures. Thus, Chap. 1, “What is gender?,” has open-ended activities centering on “femininity and masculinity in your own culture,” or  exploring how these gender roles are expressed in TV programs and commercials. Chap. 2 is a short & simple introduction to “gender socialization” and how we are constructed as boys and girls.  In the chapter “Language and gender,” students are encouraged to make surveys, asking classmates and others what they think about sexist and gender-fair language in their own native language, or to write and act out skits.  Chap. 6, “What’s in a name?,” looks at surname-changing in marriage and practices in a variety of cultures.

Chap. 7, “Domestic violence,” explores battering, which some students may have direct and painful experience of. One of its activities is to write a letter or diary page or song or poem from the point of view of a batterer, a battered person or someone who wants to help. That kind of exercise, a form of “interior monologue” where the student assumes a persona, is part of “promoting social imagination through interior monologues” within a “curriculum of empathy”(Christensen 2000: 6-7, 9; 134-37), a superb tool for engaged critical pedagogy that has been crafted into a number of the chapters.

Other chapters deal with AIDS (centering on an 11-year-old girl from Swaziland, which has the highest HIV-positive incidence in the world), sex work and pornography, beauty and gender stereotypes, gender and health, masculinities and men’s movements, heterosexism (including bisexualism and transgender), sexual freedom, reproductive rights, gender and work, and housework and the family (who shares what in the housework in your family?). The chapter on beauty and gender stereotypes (and dieting) can be nicely supplemented by Erika Miller’s classic essay on how the female body image is constructed, “A Woman’s Silent Journey” (see Christensen: 73) or the broader piece written by a student, Mary Blalock, “A Bill of Rights for Girls” (ibid.: 75-76). A strong ‘girl power’ site for further exploration at the Freechild Project is: http://www.freechild.org/wopo.htm  One ‘interior monologue’ activity in chap. 13 “Heterosexism” involves writing “a story, poem, skit, song, comic or diary page exploring the point of view of a gay, lesbian or bisexual person who faces discrimination.” For some of our students, perhaps a letter to a friend might be the easiest hands-on genre. A good supplementary site on GBLTTQQ (a common acronym for people who identify as Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Transsexual, Transgendered, Queer, or Questioning)  meant specifically for young people and their webquests is http://www.freechild.org/gblttqq.htm . Students in Thailand, where transsexuality is culturally quite acceptable (and in evidence even at my own university in the remotest province), will find texts on sexual Otherness especially relevant. A major recent much-acclaimed novel on the theme of transgender is Eugenides (2003).

Chap. 15, “Gender and the environment” centers on the Green Belt movement (anti-deforestation activism) and the work of Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, and its importance for women in Kenya (http://www.greenbeltmovement.org ). The book ends with a unit on a striking poem by Paul Arenson, “Hidden Wires,” about how femininity is constructed as girls grow up (“but it was soon I saw the hidden wires / dragging me along the road /  from doll house dreams to name brand schools / where girls becoming women learn / the princess poses that they’ll need / to lure a seed to womb”). A teacher can build links to other poems by Anne Sexton, for example, or Sylvia Plath.

A handy bibliography of 54 references consulted is appended. The attractively softbound book is a slim 50 pages, large format, with relatively large font, and no illustrations. It will open students’ and teachers’ eyes to many aspects of gender and sexism they have not considered in depth, and can be readily covered in a 16-week semester, or used as an adjunct text in an intermediate-level or more advanced course. I’m considering the book as a main text for a course focusing on writing, both personal and expository, with Thai students majoring in tourism, itself a sexism-saturated field.   It can be integrated into any intermediate-level or even advanced mixed skills course grounded on engaging content. A teacher may of course want to use a single chapter on some specific topic – the organization of the book lends itself well to such plug-ins.

Teachers will find the presentation refreshingly balanced, not cluttered with advocacy and ax-grinding for identity politics of one brand or another. The references to Japan only add to the book’s anchored utility. It can be readily and creatively used just as well with learners in industrialized economies or anywhere in the Global South. On every page, the book is an invite to reflective place-based comparison, a student’s own here & now.

Learners who have seldom thought much about how their lives and roles are constructed will find the readings here thematically challenging, perhaps for some even empowering in the senses mapped by Ira Shor (1992, esp. chap. 8). It is an excellent comprehensible and teachable introduction to a fascinating topic crucial to the topographies of critical thinking in the EFL classroom.

Gender Issues Today is very reasonably priced and can be obtained from Japan by contacting the publishers (kawamura@c-enter.co.jp ). TESOL professionals across the globe need to be more aware of the often imaginative textbooks being written across a range of skills and levels by colleagues in Japan.

References

Christensen, Linda. (2000). Reading, Writing and Rising Up. Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written  Word. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools,
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/publication/rwru/rwrutoc.shtml

Eugenides, Jeffrey. (2003) . Middlesex, New York: St. Martin’s.

Shor, Ira. (1992). Empowering Education. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.