Gender justice—both in and through language—is fundamental to my vocation. As an out queer faculty member, I center the power of language, narrative, and agency in my teaching and in my mentoring relationships. My courses span topics from French language to Francophone world cultures, and LGBTQIA+ literature to queer and feminist theories. Accordingly, gender and sexuality are embedded throughout them as forces that shape our day-to-day lives, the institutions we inhabit, and their linguistic norms. At the same time, my students and I grapple collectively with how we contribute to reinforcing or disrupting these concepts and how we might activate them to empower or to constrain.
As educators, mentors, coaches, and higher education professionals who value the flourishing of all students, we are called not only to embrace our students as they are, but also to do what we can to minimize barriers to their success at our institutions and in life. As we work to foster vocational discernment for LGBTQIA+ students, it’s worth remembering that approaches and tools that affirm diverse genders and sexualities can benefit all students, regardless of how they identify. Even when it might seem irrelevant to our roles on campus, gender matters in lived experience and, by extension, in vocational accompaniment. In this work, we ought to be mindful of the language we use and how such language opens up or shuts down possibilities for students’ self-articulation and discernment of their callings.
Recent surveys by Gallup and Pew Research Center suggest that LGBTQ+ identification is on the rise in the United States, with roughly one in five young adults identifying with a category under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Simultaneously, the past several years have been marked, on the one hand, by an increase in anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans legislation, and, on the other hand, by the amplification of gender euphoria and queer joy as forms of resistance, empowerment, and cultural transformation. Against this backdrop, many of our campuses have become—and continue to be—desperately needed sanctuary spaces for queer youth. At Augustana College, for example, we offer all-gender communities in the residence halls, gender-affirming voice and communication services, and the option for students to share their pronouns on class rosters. Many additional resources for Augustana’s LGBTQIA+ and allied community members are available through our Office of Student Inclusion and Diversity.
Personal pronouns are one aspect of gendered language that can be both life-giving and fraught for queer folks as we come into our identities and explore our vocations. Pronouns not only serve as important markers of our gender identities, they also illustrate precisely how gender-marked language can signal assumptions about the kinds of relationships we have or are expected to have. In a culture that continuously sorts us, what might it look like to imagine our classrooms and campuses as spaces where students are supported to discern and live into their vocations regardless of pronouns or lack thereof?
Undoubtedly, it is critical to affirm our students when they choose to share parts of their identities with us. Such affirmation includes personal pronouns, which may or may not align with gender identity or gender expression in ways we might expect. At the same time, I emphasize to my students that it is a gift when they share their pronouns with me and with each other, but that this sharing is neither an expectation nor a condition of full participation in class. For me, disclosing pronouns should never be compulsory. As a proponent of gender-just language pedagogy—even in my French classrooms—I provide students with communicative options that are free of linguistic gender markers alongside traditional binary pronouns and non-standard nonbinary forms.
I emphasize to my students that it is a gift when they share their pronouns with me and with each other, but that this sharing is neither an expectation nor a condition of full participation in class. For me, disclosing pronouns should never be compulsory.
To give a concrete example, I caution against well-intentioned exercises such as pronoun circle-ups, which ask students to introduce themselves concisely with their names and pronouns. The sharing of pronouns is appropriate and can be routine in spaces like genders and sexualities alliances (GSAs), where attendees self-select in because of their identities and allyship. However, in the classroom or standard extracurricular activity, this practice risks disproportionately spotlighting students who are trans, nonbinary, questioning, transitioning, unsure of their pronouns, or using different pronouns in different contexts.
On day one of each new class, I work to establish a queer-affirming space first by sharing a bit about myself and my teaching philosophy. I explain that everyone will be invited—but not obliged—to tell me about themselves in a welcome survey that I administer via a Google form. Although pronouns on rosters can be a valuable tool for instructors, it is important to me to hear from students directly, since roster pronouns don’t always accurately reflect where a student is positioned in any given moment. Moreover, I value this initial opportunity to connect with my students as individuals, and I take time to respond to each student’s survey responses via email or in a meeting during office hours.
During initial class sessions, I request that we all strive to learn everyone’s names and to refer to each other by that name. Students introduce themselves by writing their first names on the board, pronouncing them, and responding to their choice of icebreaker prompts. In my view, it is not necessary to use personal pronouns in class. Still, it can be affirming to do so once rapport is established and especially once I’ve had a chance to engage with students on an individual basis after reading their responses to my welcome survey.
Another strategy is to refer to each other using shortened forms of our names, i.e., proper pronouns. In the language classroom, this is one way I incorporate students into example sentences without gendering them through a personal pronoun, using the first letter of a student’s name to stand in as the pronoun. For example, “Cory plays basketball,” becomes, “C plays basketball,” not “She/They/He/Ze plays basketball.” Similarly, proper pronouns allow us to reference students without gendering them in, for example, email communications between campus offices. Because we have been conditioned to associate many first names with a given gender, using proper pronouns or full names allows us to suspend potentially inaccurate presumptions and, thereby, protects students from being inadvertently misgendered.
While it remains imperative to acknowledge the privileges afforded to those of us whose lives and loves align with heterosexual and cisgender norms—or the cisheteronormative status quo—we ought to engage gender and sexuality as aspects of humanness and human vocation that shape all of our lives. As Geoffrey Bateman prompts us to consider in “Queer Vocation and the Uncommon Good,” “What can it mean for queer and nonqueer readers alike to question the fundamental assumptions of how we organize our intimate lives in the world we share?” As a lifelong learner, activist teacher-scholar, and proponent of reflective practice and anti-hierarchical pedagogy, I encourage us all—regardless of how we identify—to deepen our knowledge of gender and sexuality in ways that will allow us to better support and honor the unique journeys of our students, colleagues, and community members as they explore and discern their vocations.
This work entails a sustained commitment because, just as terminology is ever evolving, gender and sexuality—like vocational exploration and discernment more broadly—need not develop in a linear fashion nor be consistent to be valid. What is more, this work entails our willingness to feel uncomfortable and to lean into questions. Our willingness to recognize, name, and disrupt previously held assumptions. Our willingness to be vulnerable with ourselves as we take stock of forces that have shaped our own vocational trajectories. Our willingness to consider the ways in which gender and sexuality might continue to play a part in how we hear and respond to our callings, and, perhaps most significantly, in how we show up to accompany young people into vocational discernment.
For further reading: On queerness and vocation, see Our Call to Trans Flourishing, Teaching Trans Vocation, Queer Embodiment, and Coming Out into Vocation. See also Hannah Schell’s interview with Jonathan Coley, author of Gay on God’s Campus.
Kiki Kosnick is associate professor of French, Francophone studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. K’s recent work on queer and feminist approaches to gender-inclusive poetics and language pedagogy has appeared in Modern & Contemporary France (2019), Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom (2021), and The Modern Language Journal (2023). K is a NetVUE faculty fellow, having participated in the 2019 NetVUE faculty seminar, Teaching Vocational Exploration. To read more posts by Kiki, click here.