The first speaker in the Women’s and Gender Studies Fall Colloquium, “Teaching and Social Justice,” Dr. Cati Connell will present “School’s Out: Gay and Lesbian Teachers in the Classroom,” based on her book of the same name.

It considers the experiences of gay and lesbian-identified teachers in California and Texas. In the book, Connell asks: how do gay and lesbian teachers grapple with their professional and sexual identities at work, given that they are constructed as mutually exclusive, even indeed as mutually opposed? The book explores the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion in the context of other complicating factors, from local law and politics to race and gender privilege.