Gender Pronouns and Cultures of Respect

Tommy Mayberry (he/she/they) is taking the pronoun world by storm. Mayberry’s “Gender Pronouns and Cultures of Respect” presentation has been heard all across the globe. As a self-described “academic drag queen”, Mayberry’s insights are helping to change pronoun blunders into activating an inclusive ideology for gender and sexed identities in people’s daily interactions. On April 28th, they bring these insights closer to home in an online presentation hosted by St. Jerome’s University’s Registrar’s Office.

About the Presentation
We’ve all done it. Said the wrong pronoun, used the wrong name, and/or otherwise referred to someone in some sexed/gendered way and immediately wished we could take it back. (And, guess what? We are all going to do it – we’re all human; we all make mistakes.) So, how can we forestall these mistakes in our work and activate in ourselves an inclusive ideology for gender and sexed identities in our daily interactions? In this session, we’ll start with some grammar and linguistic history to identify where these words come from in our language and how they work (and don’t work), and then we’ll discuss impacts and impasses of privilege and inclusivity to get us into some strategies for positive engagement with gender pronouns and pronominal systems. We’ll wrap up with highlighting pronoun awareness and cultures of respect to ultimately reflect on whiteness, marginalization, trauma, and continued struggle.

About the Speaker

Tommy Mayberry (he/she/they) is the Manager of Outreach and Recruitment at St. Jerome’s University. As an academic drag queen, Tommy works and researches from an embodied standpoint to explore, both individually and intersectionally, gender, pedagogy, performance, language, social media, and reality TV (to name but a few) and has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants. Tommy is also co-editor of the forthcoming book, RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on RuPaul’s Drag Race and Teaching and Learning (McFarland, 2020) and has presented academic work and research across Canada and internationally in Oxford, Tokyo, Washington DC, and Honolulu. They are currently finishing their PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.