This week (Week 6) is the first of three sessions whereby students will be treated to guest speakers. As a professor it is always nice to have guest speakers particularly when they can illuminate an aspect of the work and the issues that bring the readings to life in a way that is not always possible to do as the instructor for the course.
Therefore, I was very grateful for our two guest speakers Barb Flis and Laura Hughes who each offered interesting perspectives on issues related to HIV/AIDs in contemporary Detroit.
Flis did an amazing job pointing out several aspects that I hope the students will take with them.
a) that sexuality is a healthy and important part of everyone's life even the lives of young people
b) that policy has a significant effect on how sex education works in schools
c) that local school districts and local parents have a significant say in how sex education policy gets implemented.
What I hope students retained from her presentation was the importance of policy in determining how sex education gets implemented and what kind of sex education is implemented. Ultimately, this is a process that is intensely political.
Laura Hughes was the second speaker for the day. I enjoyed her presentation about HIV/AIDs in Detroit, the Ruth Ellis Center and the types of vulnerability and marginalization that puts young black lgbt youth at risk for HIV/AIDS.
In many ways, her presentation did a great job of bringing to life the readings for this week particularly Marlon M. Bailey's "Performance as intervention" and Cathy Cohen's "The Boundaries of Blackness." Both of these texts speak of intra-racial community politics and the ways in which black lgbt folk (and those affected by HIV/AIDs in black communities) face forms of marginalization within already marginalized groups.
What I would like the students to think about is how do structural and systemic inequalities based on gender, race, class, and sexuality work to produce the forms of marginality and vulnerability that place particular communities at greater risk for HIV infection and what does it mean when HIV disproportionately affects those whose "bodies don't matter" to paraphrase Judith Butler. What persistent inequalities are revealed by the HIV/AIDs crisis in the United States that points to ways in which our political system is flawed and how can we deepen our own democracy? I hope to get students to question this particularly in light of several democratic revolutions occurring on the African continent at this time.
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