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20 Teaching Sexual Violence in History
Sanchia deSouza, Joel Dickau, Edward Dunsworth, William Fysh, Benjamin Lukas, Kari North, Maris Rowe-Mcculloch, Lindsay C. Sidders, Hana Suckstorff, Nathaniel Thomas, Erica Toffoli, and Spirit-Rose Waite.
As movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp direct renewed and broadened attention to sexual violence and harassment, many sectors of society (especially workplaces) are being forced to reckon with and critically assess these forms of violence. This cultural shift has been most visible in the entertainment industry, politics, and the service sector, and has manifested in moments of both cacophony (the Women’s March) and whisper (“Sexual Harassment in the Academy” list). It has also illuminated the unequal ways that attention is paid to survivors (and alleged perpetrators) of different economic circumstances, racialized statuses, genders and sexualities, and abilities.
For a new generation of historians, this moment has prompted critical reflection beyond our contemporary workplaces to the object of our studies: the past. How should we, as historians and teachers, grapple with sexual violence in the past – in both our classrooms and our research projects – and how should we assess the intersection between historical inequities and sexual violence in the present?
To this end, a group of graduate students at the University of Toronto recently organized a five-day workshop entitled Teaching Sexual Violence in History. Over more than ten hours of discussion, debate, critique, and negotiation, grounded in secondary and primary historical sources, the group agreed that a radical transformation of how sexual violence is approached in the classroom is essential.[i]
First, we need to recognize that sexual violence cannot be treated as a purely academic subject, no matter how “distantly” in the past. Both students and teachers enter our classrooms with a wide range of identities and personal histories, including lived experiences of sexual violence.
This is a very tall order that requires a deep commitment to acknowledging the historical exclusions, systemic power dynamics, and economic and institutional barriers that make our classrooms safe and comfortable for certain students to the detriment and discomfort of the historically marginalized (women, racialized persons, the queer community, persons with disabilities, and older persons).
The discipline of history has tended to concern itself with such concepts as “critical distance” and “rational discourse.” One unfortunate result of this is that, very often, the historian teaching episodes of sexual violence pays more attention to their historical subjects than to the vulnerable people (by nature of the classroom dynamic) that sit before them.
Our discussion of the readings and our own classroom experiences revealed that the gap between historical analysis and empat