Many faculty these days face increased policing both within and outside their institutions with regard to terms flagged in their course titles that run contrary to the ultraconservative policies of governing officials in the United States. It can be a dangerous thing in our current climate to use the word “woman” in a course title, let alone “queer,” “gay” or “trans.” Paradoxically, too, among the clearest red-flags for “anti-woke” administrators is “gender,” a term that some scholars have in recent decades embraced as an encompassing and ostensibly politically neutral term for a wide variety of complex and entangled issues. If Joan Scott famously lamented in 2008 that “gender” had seemed to lose its previous disruptive power, clearly this is no longer the case! In light of the fact that many historians teaching these days may not be able to offer courses exclusively on these topics; yet a powerful strategy of resistance could be to make them (if anything) more prominent within (albeit not in the titles of) courses on other, more general topics – above all the large surveys many of us teach. Building upon this idea, which surfaced in a listening session at AHA 2025 jointly sponsored by the Committee on Gender Equity and the Committee on LGBTQ+ Status in the Profession, this workshop will be led by two scholars with extensive experience in infusing as much queer and gender content as possible into syllabi for high-enrollment service teaching courses.

The proposed workshop would be very much hands-on, aimed to yield practical takeaways. Facilitators would be asked to pre-circulate one of their favorite syllabi that do NOT flag gender, sexuality, or anything in these zones in the title but nonetheless have rich content on these topics threading through the itinerary. After a short welcome by the chair, these two facilitators would then be asked to offer brief (8-10 minutes) remarks on their process in generating these syllabi, and some general recommendations for attendees based on what worked (and did not) in their initial experiments. There would then be 10 minutes for an initial round of questions about these sample syllabi, after which participants (who would have also been asked to bring with them a syllabus they could envision “queering and gendering”) would be invited to discuss these documents in a pair-and-share with a fellow participant lasting about 20 minutes; this would afford the opportunity to try implementing the tips they’ve just been offered, and would also surface further questions for the facilitators. Facilitators would be encouraged to mingle and offer feedback to the extent that space allows during this part of the session. When only 20-25 minutes remains, the chair would bring the group back together and open the floor for general discussion/Q&A.