Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

PART II – TEACHING WITH HISTORY:
USING THE PAST TO REFLECT THE PRESENT
Teaching on the Body and Violence Against Women
Vesna Leskošek
Abstract
The article focuses on two important concepts in social work education, gender
and history. More precisely it explores what happened to women’s bodies in
history and what are the impacts on the current status of women. Women’s
bodies were exposed to different kinds of violence, including trading, trafficking,
forced marriages and mass murders. Their sexuality was controlled and
punished inside and outside heterosexual marriage. It is important to explore
these practices from a historical perspective and to reflect upon the present
status of women by examining their past experiences, because history is a part
of memory and thus of the mentalities and social processes of current times.
The question is how the unconscious, the desire and the identity of women
have been affected by punishment, forced and violent deaths, reification by
way of selling and buying, slavery and the related forced sexuality. The answers
certainly do not seem clear. In order to discover them, one should pursue
and examine the theory and policy of the body, the related discourse and the
consequences for the everyday lives of women. The case study relates to
Slovenian history, but similar historical evidence can be found throughout
Europe. There are also some teaching tips and instructions in the article; they
show how history can be used in education.
It is important for social work education to incorporate the historical
dimension of the social processes and human mentalities that frame people’s
lives. When teaching social work, there is a need for reawakening the memory
of certain social facts and events that have contributed to the establishment
of women’s social roles and positions in society. Women have diverse roles
in social work. They are educators, researchers, service providers and service
users, although the first two categories are often ignored. Joan Wallach Scott 1
claims that overlooking the female share in human history helps to sustain
the belief that sexual differences are of natural origin, which in time affects
1
Joan Scott Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
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