Below this morning’s post, reader and philosopher J.K. Gayle offers both a comment and a link to his very long, challenging, and fascinating post entitled Feminist Binary: the Eleventh Step. He riffs on everything and everyone from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous to Helene Cixous to the Dixie Chicks to C.S. Lewis to Aristotle himself. It’s a sprawling and ambitious post, and I’ve read it through twice and still struggle to absorb the whole thing. (Which is part of the point — our need for concise narratives is, in some sense, very masculine.) In any event, it’s worth a serious read if you’ve got the time.
Something Gayle wrote connected powerfully for me:
Good feminists must differentiate between the masculinist binary (“either / or”) and the feminist binary (“yes, there’s that either / or and yet there’s also the both / and”)…Bad feminism often resorts only to the mere masculinist binary, usually in the futile effort to abandon or to denigrate the masculinist binary. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed how Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie have felt they needed to abandon the feminist personal and to resort to masculinist methods “beyond the personal.”
One of the basic principles of feminist teaching is that both the subjects being covered and the pedagogy used to cover them need to embrace feminist principles. In a women’s history class like my History 25B (Introduction to Women in American Society) course, it’s obvious that feminism is the subject. But it doesn’t automatically follow that feminism is the method. As I’ve written elsewhere, I use the lecture method quite a bit (though not exclusively). The dominant mode of learning is ostensibly problematic. I’m a forty-year old straight Christian WASP male who spends a fair amount of time lecturing about feminism to a classroom that is overwhelmingly younger, female, and non-white. And in order to get all of American women’s history (and the entire feminist movement) into one short semester, I have to do more than lecture — I have to impose a coherent, logical, easy-to-grasp narrative onto what is an enormously complex subject. I must cover all of American women’s history from the pre-Columbian period to last week, expose the students to basic feminist theory, and inspire them to connect this material to their own lives. I’m keenly aware that I’m critiquing patriarchy and embodying it at the same time.
But in class discussions and journals, the students are encouraged to “push back”. The personal is still political (and historical), after all; surely there is no more basic tenet of feminism than that. I don’t try and anticipate my students’ responses to the material any longer. Every time I try and predict their reactions, I’m wrong. I’m grateful that after all of these years (and thousands of students in my women’s studies classes), I’m still capable of being surprised. More importantly, I work hard to keep the course just flexible enough to allow my students’ own discoveries and desires to drive its direction. Though my students need a sense of the past, they will not embrace feminism for themselves unless it connects directly to their own lives. And no matter how much I think I know, I can’t presume what will and what won’t connect.
In class this morning, we were going over one particular chapter from Flirting with Danger. At one point, Lynn Phillips talks about the way so many of the young women she interviewed spoke of “losing their voice” at key moments. In situations where they felt awkward, uncertain, or powerless (and those situations could be sexual, familial, academic, professional, etc.) these women found themselves being “struck mute.” For some, at the critical moment, they could not say what they wanted and said “yes” when they would rather have said “no”, or “no” when they would rather have said “yes”, or said nothing when they would rather have said “I’m not sure. Can I get back to you on that?”
For others, the “muteness” manifested itself differently. Only after a humiliating or bewildering scenario had ended did they suddenly realize what it was that they wished that they had said. Going farther than Phillips did, I point out gently that a great many people — women in particular — have rich fantasy lives revolving around what they wish that they had been able to say in a particular situation. “If I’d thought about it at the time…. or been bold enough… I would have told him what I really felt. But instead, I just kept quiet… I just agreed with my mother to keep the peace… I just figured it wasn’t worth it… I was just too scared.” I read this and hear this over and over and over. And as a teacher and a mentor both, it haunts me. It haunts me not only because my students aren’t always speaking up as often as perhaps they themselves would like, but because for so many of them in so many aspects of their lives, the gulf between what they long to say and what they actually do manage to get out is still so very great. Bridging that gulf, I’m convinced, is a feminist issue.
The paradox of feminist teaching is obvious. We (feminist teachers) want our students to understand feminism. We want them to connect their own lives and experiences to feminism. We want them to find their own voices, and once found, we want them to use those voices with increasing confidence, perhaps to the point that they become our partners in creating and maintaining a safe, exciting and ever-more-empowering feminist conversation. At the same time, I feel sometimes that in order to do my job well, I must endlessly deconstruct my own authority. If I become the all-knowing dispenser of feminist history and my students the largely passive recipients (if I really stick with my controversial and somewhat tongue-in-cheek farming analogy), then I’m not really doing much to challenge the patriarchal idea that knowledge flows downwards, hierarchically, from privileged males to less-privileged females.
So many women are raised to shame and silence their own feelings, particularly when it comes to expressing desires, setting boundaries, expressing anger. From the time I was little, I marveled at how many women I knew seemed to take a longer time than I did to figure out how they were feeling about something –or to work up the courage to say it. My third wife was a champ at this: I’d say something in passing around Easter time, and it would go by uncommented upon; ’round about the Fourth of July, she’d say “You remember when you said x to me? Well, I’ve been thinking about it and it really bothered me.” I’d forgotten the whole damn thing. And it wasn’t that my ex-wife was too afraid to tell me her true feelings at the time, it was that it had taken her that long to process and figure out exactly what it was that she was feeling. Now she was a bit of an extreme case, but I’m convinced that this “slow processing” phenomenon is at least partially acculturated. In other words, it’s something we force women to do by shutting down expressions of strong emotion (particularly, again, around boundaries, desires, or rage) at a very young age. So good feminist pedagogy is not only about creating safe space for the expression of strong emotion, but providing the opportunity to do the difficult but rewarding work of speeding up the “processor” of that emotion. (To use a computer analogy, it’s about gradually upgrading an Intel 486 processor to, say, a Pentium D.)
This is all difficult stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever teach the perfect feminist course, and I wouldn’t want to: no matter how polished my lectures become, they could never meet the unique and ever-shifting needs of my students. I have to do more than listen to their voices, I have to let their voices shape and direct the way in which the material is covered. But in order for that to happen, I’ve gotta create space for those voices to speak.
Fave quote: “There are ten kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
Wow. What insight but what a personal narrative (again)!
Those of us who struggle with learning, with hoping to teach, with doing and with being (in a body, whether sexed male or female), get the fact that the struggle’s not exactly like the mid 19th century American struggle with slavery. And what an ugly bloody struggle. Abolitionists (black and white, male and female) fought, but all too often died, for freedom, for others.
What you blog about is as profound on a different level. To have to critique patriarchy and to risk embodying patriarchy at the same time, now that just divides your soul. Patriarchy is less visible, in a way more shameful, than slavery. But to enable voice, to give (as Nancy Mairs calls them) “voice lessons,” and (as you put it, Hugo Schwyzer) “to let their voices shape and direct the way in which the material is covered,” is both to fight patriarchy with your own life but also to en-courage others to be and do to experience freedom for women and men, equally.
(and, I’m still laughing at commenter John Spragge’s quotation, from Chris Chandler — woman who must experience binary, but understands it multiply).
Thanks for sharing. Thanks for including others’ voices. Thanks for letting the voices enact, and tell our stories, and admit progress not perfection, and hang damn concision from time to time, when our daddies have been absent and abusive. (Thanks for the links and generous comments).
The paradox of feminist teaching is obvious. We (feminist teachers) want our students to understand feminism. We want them to connect their own lives and experiences to feminism. We want them to find their own voices, and once found, we want them to use those voices with increasing confidence, perhaps to the point that they become our partners in creating and maintaining a safe, exciting and ever-more-empowering feminist conversation. At the same time, I feel sometimes that in order to do my job well, I must endlessly deconstruct my own authority. If I become the all-knowing dispenser of feminist history and my students the largely passive recipients (if I really stick with my controversial and somewhat tongue-in-cheek farming analogy), then I’m not really doing much to challenge the patriarchal idea that knowledge flows downwards, hierarchically, from privileged males to less-privileged females.
I don’t think this is a paradox of feminist teaching in particular. It’s a paradox of all good teaching. It’s especially acute in classes like college algebra — not exactly a field fiercely fought over by feminists and anti-feminists, though it is also not without its sexism — where the instructor’s goal is to get a group of students who have thoroughly internalised the idea that they are bad at math to appreciate the beauty and power of algebra on its own terms. You can’t just do problems endlessly on the board and get that result.
Personally, I think the “slow processing” you mention is not mainly about identifying our feelings or having the courage to talk about it, but about finding the peace and confidence to allow ourselves to even feel those things. I can wrestle for days or weeks with an emotion, unwilling to recognize it or acknowledge it, because I have been acculterated to believe that emotion or reaction is inappropriate. Once I have accepted that my reaction is ‘true’ or ‘justified,’ I don’t need courage to express it - but reaching that point of acceptance is what takes time (and why the amount of time we need to process is so varied from person to person, and emotion to emotion).
It’s funny, because introspection should be a blessing, and yet we are often taught to use it only to devalue or delegitimize our emotional response to hurts and injustices.
Deborah at Girl with Pen shares ideas for her students (encouraging, asking as Hugo does).
She says, “NO one else has your brain, your particular constellation of experience and perspective. So even if you hear of someone else writing about the very topic that has become your heart and soul, TRY not to let it get you down. It’s hard, I know. I learned this the hard way. . . So the trick is to tap into your particular contribution–from the start. What perspective/experience/angle do you have, because of who you are, that others don’t?”
Her post is “I Heart Teaching this Course.”
Jeff at Feminist Allies has good warnings and thoughts for male feminist instructors in “What Men Can Do Wednesday: Armchair Feminist, Part Two.”
There, he explains: “men who identify as feminists or feminist allies have to watch out that they don’t get caught up in too much ‘armchair feminism’–that is, we have to keep in mind that we may too often slip into a detached sort of conceptualizing of feminism, in part because we don’t as often or as easily find ourselves face-to-face with the harms that patriarchy and misogyny can cause.”