Gender, sexuality and communication.

The latest episode in our Resilience Unravelled series has now been released, Resilience Unravelled – Gender, sexuality and communication.

In this episode, Dr. Russell Thackeray talks to Georgie Williams, a specialist in gender and sexuality whose work focuses on how gender and sexuality varies in different communities and cultures around the world and how the Wests influence on those communities has shaped those identities.

Georgie identifies specifically as genderqueer and as pansexual. Georgie’s recent papers have focused predominantly on marginality pertaining to queer and specifically non-cisgender identities, but has also written about aspects of sexuality, structural violence, borders and bodies as sites of resistance through interdisciplinary and intersectional lenses.

Gender and sexuality play an integral role in all of our lives. Our dynamics, our sexual and non-sexual relationships and the roles assigned to us socially are often based around our gender perceptions of one another. In understanding how gender and sexuality vary, we can understand miscommunications between communities and cultures based on a mistranslation or misalignment of norms and practices.  If we understand them, that exclusivity is a means to create productivity, symbiosis and communication within communities. Understanding sexuality is about communication, something that benefits all of us

Georgie feels that the younger generation, in particular Generation Z, engages and focuses with this message more than many of the older generation. By focusing on visibility and representation, community based social change and practice can happen which really matters as it gives voices to individuals who were not afforded that opportunity in the first place. She thinks that globalization and access to the internet virtual spaces and social media has given younger people the opportunity to congregate and find their community.

The younger generation has been raised in a time where conversation around gender and sexuality is more open than ever before.  People can discuss sensitive matters in confidence with others who have gone through it before. In time social change can be enacted and communities will become more visible in non-virtual spaces. Small communities and marginal groups have always existed and found ways to congregate but now this is more feasible and visible.

One of the benefits of engaging with diversity in the workplace is that it focuses a brand new lens on what an organisation is doing. This will help shed light on potential blind spots that existing team members may have missed because of their own standpoint or experience.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information about Georgie here. Our previous podcast episodes and upcoming guest list are also available. Our full blog archive is also available.

You can find out more about Georgie at /slashqueer.com