Archive for the 'Feminist Pedagogy' Category

Against anxiety: of Full Frontal Feminism, the vapid recklessness of youth, and the reminder of the salutary effects of dirt

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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 14, 2008
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Sexuality and Youth
. 29 Comments

I wrote a post last November about the very positive reception my students had given to Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti’s immensely popular and useful primer and polemic.

Now that I’ve assigned the book to several different classes, I’ve had a chance to collect a wider variety of reactions. Happily, the responses of my students to Valenti’s text remain uniformly positive, or very nearly so. And perhaps not surprisingly, one particular section of FFF continues to elicit the most impassioned reactions. In November 2007, I quoted this short section:

I’ve had more than a couple of embarrassing moments in my life and sexual history — but isn’t that what makes us who we are? Do we really have to be on point and thinking politics all the time? Sometimes doing silly, disempowering, sexually vapid things when you’re young is just part of getting to the good stuff.

That resonated with my students then, and it resonates now. I had some great in-class discussions about this particular passage in my spring class, and got some marvelous journal responses as well. And the real meaning of those three sentences is deeper than may first appear. One of the most salient of Jessica Valenti’s points is that the dominant narrative, the one that suggests that poor choices in puberty (particularly poor sexual choices made by girls) will “ruin your life”, is largely a false one. Continue reading ‘Against anxiety: of Full Frontal Feminism, the vapid recklessness of youth, and the reminder of the salutary effects of dirt’

Blue book essays and the Martha Complex: on time management, test-taking, and letting go of perfectionism

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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 11, 2008
in Feminist Pedagogy, Teaching and The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls
. 7 Comments

I’m grading summer midterms today, with an eye to passing them back Monday. I gave all three of my summer classes their midterms on Tuesday. In each class, including my women’s history course, the midterm was designed to take ninety minutes. Within that time, students were to answer two out of three essay questions within their blue books.

Yesterday, after my 25B (Women in American Society) class, two of my students asked to meet with me briefly. Both young women were very concerned that they each had done poorly on the exam for the same reason, namely that they had spent too much time answering the first question leaving themselves little time for the second. I gave them my standard spiel about the importance of time management, and reminded them that no matter how poorly they had done on the midterm, a strong final exam could go a long way towards lifting their course grade.

But we also talked briefly about perfectionism. For years, I’ve given the same classic exams: “blue book” essays, with students required to complete two prompts within a given period of time. Each essay is worth 50 points. And I’ve noted that my female students, particularly the very bright ones, often have a great deal of trouble managing their time effectively. Part of the trick of doing well on these exams is learning to let go of the perfectionist desire to write one flawless essay. Spending the full class period crafting one beautiful, elegant paper will earn the student a poor grade. One “50″ (a perfect score) and one “0″ is an F grade; two “35s” will earn a C.

There’s a method to this madness, and its rooted in more than a desire to inflict upon my students the same testing techniques that were inflicted on me. Learning how to write well under time pressure is an important, even vital academic skill. From a pedagogical standpoint, we can debate whether or not that’s as useful a skill as some academics imagine it to be. But there’s little doubt that my students, as they transfer on to four-year institutions, will continue to be exposed to tests that evaluate their competence at writing effectively under time pressure. And as long as these tests are given at places like UCLA, I have an obligation to prepare my students for those exams.

But there’s another purpose too, one that ties in to feminist work. I’ve written a lot about the “Martha Complex”: the relentless pressure that so many young women feel to be “perfect” in every area of their lives. This perfectionism shows up in disordered eating of course, but it also shows up in the tendency of many of the best and brightest to overload themselves with work, volunteer activities, and family obligations. Classic symptoms of the Martha Complex include near-constant anxiety and exhaustion. Not surprisingly, those with the Martha Complex feel a huge pressure to do well on exams. So knowing this, why do I offer the particular sort of tests that I do? Continue reading ‘Blue book essays and the Martha Complex: on time management, test-taking, and letting go of perfectionism’

“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict

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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 10, 2008
in Academia, Age, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Male feminists, Mentoring and Teaching
. 3 Comments

It’s taken me far too long, but I finally finished Deborah Siegel’s immensely engaging Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Deborah is a wonderful writer, and she’s produced the most readable summary of the last forty years of intra-feminist conflict that I’ve seen in print. I may find a way to work it into a syllabus sometime in the next year or two.

At times, Siegel visits a similar theme to the one Astrid Henry explored in Not My Mother’s Sister, a book I reviewed here. Read together, Henry and Siegel offer a sobering account of how the conflict between so-called “Second” and “Third” wave feminists emerged and has continued to play out. Both books were, of course, written well before Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House formally began, but the issues raised by her campaign make the two texts (particularly, perhaps, Siegel’s) seem positively prescient.

But what I was keenly aware of as I finished Deborah’s book was the degree to which intra-generation feminist conflict facilitates male privilege. Specifically, it facilitates my privilege as a male gender studies professor.

I don’t spend a lot of time in my women’s studies classes dwelling on my own maleness. I may have a robust ego, but I draw the line at a kind of pedagogical narcissism that invites the students to reflect at length on their feelings about the professor. Still, there’s no point ignoring my maleness, any more than there’s any point ignoring my whiteness or my age. We teach, after all, as embodied persons. All those who can see or hear (and all of my students can do at least one of these tasks) can sense that a man is teaching women’s studies. I’m not the only man in academia doing it (read my tribute to David Allen), but I am the only one doing it at Pasadena City College. It’s appropriate to create a forum where students can question whether a man can or should be teaching feminism to a predominantly female class, and I try and do that at least once a semester. Continue reading ‘“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict’

“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotype

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on May 5, 2008
in Feminist Pedagogy, GLBTQ and Men and Masculinity
. 29 Comments

Frederick sends me a link to this article from last week’s University of Chicago paper: Men find Academic Home in Gender Studies.

Sexuality, masculinity, and interracial pornography have held particular allure for David Klein since high school, but only after coming to the U of C did Klein find a theoretical framework for talking about his interests.

“Theories of gender and sexuality have a part in everything. I think queer theory has a lot to offer in terms of frameworks for looking at the world,” said Klein, who is a second-year in the College.

Klein is one of only three undergraduate men currently declared as gender studies majors at the University.

Since the creation of the major in 1996, men have comprised around 20 percent of undergraduate gender studies majors. However, with an average of only four undergraduate gender studies majors per year, the small department often graduates classes without any men at all.

Men historically make up around 10-15% of the students in my women’s history class. They make up around 45% of the students in my men and masculinity course, 40% of the students in my “beauty and the body” class, and traditionally make up about half of my gay and lesbian history survey. We don’t have formally declared majors at the community college, of course. I do know, however, that I’ve been successful in “converting” a number of students to a Women’s Studies/Gender Studies track after transfer. But of those students who do transfer on as Gender Studies majors, most– about 80% — are women. It’s one thing to get guys to take the classes, and another thing altogether to get them to make it the focus of their academic careers. Continue reading ‘“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotype’

Women’s history syllabus update

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on April 21, 2008
in Books and Feminist Pedagogy
. 12 Comments

I’ve made some changes to my Fall 2008 women’s history syllabus, dumping the textbook and going entirely with trade paperbacks. Six books total, but with a cost savings to my students of some $30 over this semester, and no increase in the overall number of pages assigned. I’ve taken seriously the charge to be more inclusive in the way in which I teach the intersectionality of race and class with gender history; it’s my hope that this reading list reflects the next step on that road. Implementing these books — particularly Andrea Smith’s Conquest — will be a considerable pedagogical challenge for me, but a necessary one.

First Generations: Women in Colonial America , Carol Berkin (1997)
The Body Project, Joan Brumberg (1997)
A History of U.S. Feminisms, Rory Dicker (2008)
Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti (2007)
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith (2005)
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

Three of the six books come from small, independent presses like Southend and Seal. I’m delighted to direct my money — and that of my students — towards publishing houses run by and for feminists.

This updating of the syllabus has been overdue, and I’m excited to see what comes of it. I teach four sections of women’s history a year, with a total of over 200 students; I will share their feedback as it becomes available.

Avoiding the zero-sum game: on feminist publishing, citing, and using Jessica Valenti and Andrea Smith together

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on April 13, 2008
in Books, Feminist Pedagogy, Race, Teaching and WAM 2008
. 55 Comments

I’m taking a break from packing for our spring break trip to offer a Sunday afternoon post. We’re off tomorrow to the place where ‘Canes roam, where Democratic delegates wait in limbo this spring, and where dear old Gianni Versace breathed his last. It’s a region I love visiting every year, but gosh, I’m always as happy to leave as I am to arrive. It doesn’t help that I love the sun and the sun doesn’t love me. (My friend Joe and I used to run shirtless together; Joe, an ER physician, always called me a “melanoma farm.”) And I’m eager for the warm waters of the Atlantic.

Later today or tonight, I’m going to close comments I have closed comments on this post regarding the Amanda Marcotte, feminists-of-color, plagiarism/appropriation/attribution fight that happened across our corner of the blogosphere this week. I don’t regret having taken the tack I did in the original post, but I do appreciate the many and disparate voices that weighed in here. The general rule that threads rarely stay productive after the 200th comment may not have applied, but better not to push it. Two other threads with good discussions of this issue were at Feministe and Amptoons. I remain convinced of two things: first, that Amanda did nothing to deserve the opprobrium directed her way; two, that the mainstream, predominantly white feminist blogosphere (of which I am most decidedly a part) has more to do in terms of both listening and crediting what we hear.

When we were gathered in Cambridge two weeks ago for the Women, Action, and Media conference, I chose not to go to the panel on women–of-color bloggers. I missed out on the chance to meet the likes of Blackamazon, Brownfemipower, and Sudy. And I’ll be honest: I weighed whether to go up until the last minute. I talked to a few people at WAM whom I trust, and who were familiar with the often bitter and bewildering exchanges I had with many of those same bloggers in last year’s long and exhausting Full Frontal Feminism fiasco. (Do a search in my archives or in the archives of half the feminist blogosphere — first in May, and then around Thanksgiving, things got heated.) These friends told me that while there was some potential for good, it might be best if I didn’t go to the Women of Color panel. That was my gut intuition as well. Perhaps I flatter myself unduly, but I wondered if, in the aftermath of all that had happened, my presence would be a noticeable irritant. It would be hard — given that I was just about the only man over forty at the entire conference, and the only one in a bright pink shirt — for me to be unobtrusive. So I didn’t go. Continue reading ‘Avoiding the zero-sum game: on feminist publishing, citing, and using Jessica Valenti and Andrea Smith together’

No break from the “heavy beast”: on teaching, the body, and the danger of triggering

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on March 19, 2008
in Body, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Teaching
. 3 Comments

In my Humanities class on “Beauty and the Body”, we’ve been comparing some of the various theories about the etiology of modern eating disorders. It’s a lot of ground to cover: medical models, cultural models, psychological models. (Today, we begin talking about Courtney Martin’s wonderful new book: Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.) It’s a tough class to teach for many reasons, not the least of which is that so much of the material is automatically triggering for some who are already struggling with “body issues.”

Over the last two lectures, I’ve been talking about everything from Western mind/body dualism to the Mosaic law to Sigmund Freud. The basic case is simple: much of our culture, for a variety of historical reasons, teaches us the Gnostic notion that the soul, our truest self, is imprisoned in a corrupt and foul body. The “heavy beast” that is always with us is our flesh, but these voices tell us that the “real self” is somewhere deep inside, an ethereal spirit locked in a corporeal cage. The notion that the body, with all its effluvia and its frailties, is disgusting and offensive is deeply rooted in several strands of the Western tradition. And these strands all contribute to a contemporary culture in which self-denial becomes virtue. After all, to pick the anorectic example, a woman who starves herself to the point that her periods stop and her bowel movements become very infrequent has, in a very real sense, given herself an illusion of mastery and purity. If the body’s demands and emissions are dirty, then self-starvation becomes not only about self-denial but about ritualized cleansing and transcendence. Continue reading ‘No break from the “heavy beast”: on teaching, the body, and the danger of triggering’

Andrea Smith denied tenure

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on March 4, 2008
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Race and Teaching
. 37 Comments

Brownfemipower has taken the lead on reporting the story of Andrea Smith’s denial of tenure at the University of Michigan. Read here and here, and see the report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed here.

It’s a strange case. Smith had been given a joint appointment in American Studies and Women’s Studies at the Ann Arbor campus; ’twas the latter department that nixed her promotion while the former supported her tenure cause. She’s also the director of the campus Native American Studies Center. Few of us are privy to the details of her file, and the Women’s Studies department at Michigan has not commented on why it has denied Smith tenure. But to those of us familiar with Smith’s published work, the decision is inexplicable. Her book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide is a master-work of both advocacy and feminist scholarship, and is used in women’s studies courses across the country. (It’s on the short list of books I’m considering rotating in to my women’s history syllabus).

At research universities, the proven ability to publish is a critical part of getting tenure. So many assistant professors struggle to get anything notable into print; Smith has already done so by producing a text that is not just interesting but fundamentally ground-breaking. She’s got another book coming up: Native Americans and the Christian Right, which is available for pre-order.

Of course, being able to publish is not the only prerequisite for tenure. Teaching counts for something, even at mammoth state institutions. But the statement released by faculty and students at Michigan (available here, in PDF format) makes it clear that Andrea Smith has immense talents as a teacher and mentor. Her students and colleagues are asking that letters in support of her tenure case (which has been appealed) be sent to

* Teresa Sullivan, Provost and Executive VP for Academic Affairs, LSA, tsull@umich.edu
* Lester Monts, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, LSA, lmonts@umich.edu
* Mary Sue Coleman, President, PresOff@umich.edu
* TenureForAndreaSmith@gmail.com

Anyone who reads the feminist blogosphere is aware that the most painful struggle of the past year, played out in so many places, is over the issue of the intersection of racism and sex. A number of prominent women of color have written, time and again, of feeling marginalized or ignored by white feminists. Whatever your feelings on the issue of race, gender, and intersectionality, it’s disastrous PR to have the Smith denial come at the hands of the Michigan Women’s Studies department. To a community of activist women of color, many of whom are already suspicious of the bona fides of white feminists, the Smith decision can only serve to increase a sense of cynicism about the prospects for real inclusion.

I’ve never met Andrea Smith or heard her lecture. I wouldn’t recognize her on the street. But I’ve read her work and been galvanized by it. I’ve chatted with people who have worked with her and heard her speak at conferences. Anecodotally, everyone I’ve heard from says she’s not merely a competent and inspiring teacher, she’s an extraordinary one. Her more than one-dozen published, peer-reviewed essays, her edited anthologies, and above all, her first masterwork “Conquest“, are building blocks of a tenure file that would put those of virtually any other junior scholar to shame. The Women’s Studies department at Michigan surely has its reasons, but until it makes those reasons clear, the shock and anger and alienation generated by their denial of tenure to Andrea Smith will continue to spread. And that’s bad news for all feminists.

And here’s hoping that if Michigan doesn’t come to its senses, someone else (are you listening, USC?) makes a nice offer. Soon.

Women’s Studies: not dead yet, thanks

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on February 15, 2008
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Pasadena City College
. 1 Comment

A reader named Fred kindly sends me a link to this Times Online story that ran a couple of weeks ago: Last women standing. According to Esther Oxford (love the name), Women’s Studies as a discipline is on the decline in the United Kingdom:

…the UK’s last stand-alone undergraduate degree in women’s studies, London Metropolitan used to have places for 35 undergraduates on the course. But in 2005, it stopped accepting new students.

It is all a far cry from the heyday for women’s studies in the late Eighties and early Nineties. In the past two decades, departments across Britain have been forced to integrate into other departments or to close outright. Only MAs and PhDs appear to be surviving the cull.

One problem has been the sustained attack on women’s studies as a “soft” subject appealing to fringe elements and perpetuating old-fashioned, irrelevant debates. Women and society have moved on, say critics, but women’s studies remains framed by the politics of a particular time, namely the feminist movement of the Seventies.

To be accurate, as the article makes clear, many Women’s Studies programs in Britain (as here in the United States) aren’t disappearing entirely. Instead, they are being folded into the larger discipline of Gender Studies. For example, here in Los Angeles, we see that the number of doctoral programs in Women’s Studies has been halved in the past few years. UCLA still has a Women’s Studies program, while arch-rival USC has a Gender Studies program — which grew out of an older Women’s Studies major. (Both are first rate.) It would be dishonest, however, to suggest that because there are fewer programs using the term “women’s studies” that the subject is on the decline. At some institutions, name changes reflect that the study of sex and society has been broadened and deepened rather than reduced,

(Parenthetically, I note that while I was an undergraduate, the “meteorology” major disappeared and was replaced by “Atmospheric Sciences”. It would have been silly to conclude that folks lost interest in studying weather simply because the nomenclature was altered!) Continue reading ‘Women’s Studies: not dead yet, thanks’

White men teaching feminism to women of color: a post about class, privilege, and the need for humility, curiosity, and flexibility

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 28, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, Feminist Pedagogy and Race
. 19 Comments

With the re-emergence of the Full Frontal Feminism discussion this past week, I’ve been called to reflect on the challenges and privileges that come with being a middle-class, heterosexual, Christian white man who teaches gender studies. (I say “gender studies” because, even though PCC still has no such formal department, I teach courses on Women’s History, Men and Masculinity, Lesbian and Gay History, and “body” history.)

I’ve written about the problematic nature of my role as a man teaching feminism before. Here’s part of what I wrote three years or so ago:

I do acknowledge that having a man teaching women’s history to a class filled with women (and always at least one or two other men) is problematic. I know just how important it is that young women have feminist role models who, in both their work and their private lives, can live out feminist principles. But higher education is not just about providing role models! It is about the principle that knowledge itself has no sex, and that all human experience is equally worthy of study by all human beings. When we limit the teaching of women’s studies to women, we send the message that this subject is not, somehow, worth the time and attention of male academics. This does not mean that a male teacher confers a legitimacy his female colleagues do not — though some students may perceive it that way. But it does mean that it is immensely counter-productive to “ghettoize” (I use that term carefully) an academic discipline by suggesting that only some folks can teach it.

… “being a woman” does not guarantee compassion or empathy with other women! Women of color in the feminist movement have spent years having their concerns marginalized by their white, upper-middle class sisters. What makes a wealthy white woman more qualified to teach her Latina and African-American sisters than, say, a Latino man — or for that matter, a white man? Feminists who insist that the oppression of sex transcends racial and economic discrimination do a colossal injustice to the experiences of both men and women of color. My point is simple: if we are going to take a teacher’s sex into account, we must also take his or her race into account — and that sets up a slippery slope towards the extreme Balkanization of academic disciplines.

Of course, most of my critics in the “feminist/womanists of color” blogosphere haven’t said “Hugo can’t teach women’s studies merely because he’s a middle-class white Christian male.” Too suggest otherwise is to erect a straw-woman to knock down. What is clear is that my pedagogical decisions (like assigning Full Frontal Feminism in the way in which I did, and managing the discussion the way I did), combined with my maleness and my whiteness, raises a number of questions about teaching, feminism, sex, race, and power.

I don’t know what it’s “like” to be a woman. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up poor, or to grow up non-white, or to grow up in a religious minority. Sometimes, even in recent days, I’ve made the classic white male liberal mistake of trying to establish my progressive bona fides by the classes I took taught by radical women of color, or by talking about my marriage to a mixed-race woman. That’s a cheap and ineffective strategy, and it tends to infuriate the very people I’m trying to convince. I can recite the books I’ve read, I can name-drop until the cows come home, and it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got a tremendous amount of white privilege.

I’m forty, older than most of the folks who’ve been involved in this debate. I’ve been teaching gender studies here at PCC since 1995, my third year at the college. And even after all this time, I know I still frequently “don’t get it”. Unlearning the acculturation to privilege is painful, it is hard, and the hardest and most painful thing about it is it never, ever ends. Every time I start to “believe my own press”, and begin to imagine that I have become a particularly enlightened being, a person who has transcended his class, his culture, and his sex, I am brought rudely back to earthly reality. I have a penis and a Y chromosome, I am melanin-deficient, and my speech and my bearing reflects a carefully-bred confidence that comes from privilege. Whether or not I think my sex or my race or my class matter, my students (almost none of whom share that particularly constellation of privileges) are likely to see me as a very familiar sort of figure: the older white man who knows a lot (or thinks he does) and is eager to enlighten them.

My women’s studies classes average 45-50 students now (before 2004, I taught in a smaller classroom and had only 30-35). I need to cover women’s history in America from the pre-Columbian era to five minutes ago, and I need to cover contemporary women’s issues — especially feminism — at the same time. I have 75 minutes twice a week in which to pull this off; I have no teaching assistants. The room is too crowded to have us sit in a circle, and the size of the class means interactivity will be severely limited. Lecturing, therefore, is going to be the primary pedagogical tool; that’s of necessity as much as of inclination. The students do write journals, they do initiate discussions from time to time, but most of the time, it’s me talking to them. I make my lectures as captivating as possible, and when I’m “on”, I’m a pretty damn good orator. Which is fine, except that having a middle-class white man strut and fret in front of a classroom that is made up primarily of first-generation female students of color doesn’t do much to undermine the patriarchy. The more I exhort, the more I inspire, the more I risk reinforcing something very traditional.

I can’t do anything about the size of the class. (Indeed, because it is a popular class, I was asked to consider moving into a larger lecture room that accomodates 150. I turned down the offer and asked for two smaller sections instead, and was told that wasn’t feasible.) And I can’t do anything about my maleness, my whiteness, or the fact that I grew up in Carmel, went to prep school (though I was kicked out!) and live a moderately comfortable life. But there’s still a lot I can do, even with the limitations of a large class size and my own privilege. And the chief thing I need to continue to do, and to get better at doing, is to remain teachable.

Actually, that’s not quite enough. As I was reminded this week, “remaining teachable” is essentially passive. It asks those who want me to change to do the work of teaching me. Perhaps it would be better to say that I need to work on three things in particular: humility, curiosity, flexibility. The arguments over Full Frontal Feminism haven’t changed my mind about the usefulness of the book as a highly accessible primer. But the arguments have reminded me to be a better listener to criticism, more humble about my role in facilitating learning, and to be more actively curious in seeking out alternative views to provide to my students. I need to better, too, about being flexible. Like most ageing academics, I get attached to the “way things have always been done”, and tend to be loth to update my syllabi.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I teach gender studies courses because I want to raise up young feminists. I want to inspire men and women alike to become informed agents of personal and collective transformation. I want them to reflect upon the past — and upon their own lives. I want the result of that reflection to be a strong sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. I want them to be committed to justice for the vulnerable and equality for all — but I also want them to begin to liberate themselves from self-doubt and self-loathing. I believe that personal happiness and public virtue are, in the end, deeply compatible (as a Christian who grew up listening to my mother’s lectures on Aristotle, I could hardly believe otherwise!) And in the end, I want my students to be happy, free, kind, independent, and good. That has been my goal for a very long time.

My male body, my family background, and my white skin have opened many doors for me. I cannot close those doors retroactively. I’m not ashamed of my masculinity, my heterosexuality, or my class. (See the OKOP post.) But I’m not inordinately proud of these things either. Privilege is not the consequence of virtue. It’s simply a fact, and it’s one of which I have to remain perpetually cognizant. Sometimes, privilege will blind me, and I will need help to see the right path. But in the end, privilege is both an advantage and an obstacle to good feminist teaching. And as long as I am aware that it is a double-edged sword, and as long as I remain committed with evangelistic zeal to my students’ growth, I’ll do a good job.

That is, if I work harder at humility, curiosity, and flexibility.

The master’s voice, the students’ voices: some more thoughts on feminist pedagogy, microprocessors, and creating safe space

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 13, 2007
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Teaching
. 5 Comments

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. Continue reading ‘The master’s voice, the students’ voices: some more thoughts on feminist pedagogy, microprocessors, and creating safe space’

Mothers, daughters, and sons: some thoughts on Astrid Henry and inter-generational feminist rebellion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 13, 2007
in Books, Feminism and Feminist Pedagogy
. 5 Comments

I’m a little bleary-eyed this Tuesday morning. The cold I was fighting off all of last week settled on me with some force on Saturday, and it still lingers today. The onset of illness did not prevent my wife and me from taking a much-needed “short break” (as the English would say) — we gave ourselves 24 hours at a nearby hotel. No cell phones, no computers, just lots of rest and time for each other. We’ve been going non-stop at one thing or another since late August, and we needed a quick recharge before settling into the holiday frenzy that now looms.

Though his site is not work-safe for all, Figleaf has some very kind (and interesting) things to say about my recent post on a “passionately feminist” marriage.

And I’ve just finished Astrid Henry’s Not my Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third Wave Feminism (I learned about the Henry book from Courtney Martin at Feminsting.) The book explores the “mother-daughter” model to describe the conflict between two successive waves of feminism: the Second Wave of the 1960s and early ’70s and the Third Wave that began to emerge in the early 1990s. Feminists of the Second Wave (everyone from Betty Friedan to Shulamith Firestone) were born between 1920-1955; the Third Wave roughly corresponds to “Generation X” (1964-1981). Some folks, of course, now speak of a Fourth Wave. To outsiders, it all gets very confusing. Though imperfect, the Wikipedia definitions of Second and Third Wave feminism are helpful.

My mother was — and still is - in many respects a classic “Second Wave” feminist. Born in 1937, she graduated from Vassar in 1959, back when it was still an all-women’s college. She was influenced by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and, later, Betty Friedan. My mother was active in the League of Women Voters, and joined the National Organization for Women more or less upon its 1966 inception. Throughout my early childhood, Ms. Magazine was on the coffee table. My mother had an enormous influence on my sense of what feminism was; indeed, even after all of these years of teaching women’s studies, when someone asks me for a mental image of a feminist I still see my mother, circa 1975: short hair, black wool turtleneck, smoking Vantage cigarettes, sitting at her desk in her study reading Hobbes. (I realize that in that image I have of Mom, she’s younger than I am now.)
Continue reading ‘Mothers, daughters, and sons: some thoughts on Astrid Henry and inter-generational feminist rebellion’

All-female and all-male day

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 22, 2007
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Teaching
. 3 Comments

Most semesters (but not all) I hold an “all-female day” and an “all-male day” in my Women in American Society class. My “all-female” day was last Tuesday, and my “all-male” day will be this Thursday.

I got the idea from a group of students who took the class in the spring of ‘01. That was a particularly strong group, and one day midway through the semester a small delegation approached me in my office. In a class that was 80% female, 20% male, they asked me to facilitate two separate days, one for students of each sex. Instead of a lecture, we’d have a structured discussion, sitting in a circle. The all-male and all-female days would happen late in the semester after students had had a chance to absorb and really think about a lot of the material. The single sex environment would, it was hoped, promote greater candor, greater frankness, and greater opportunity for same-sex bonding.

I checked out the legality of having a single-sex classroom for a day,and was assured by my division dean at the time that as long as I offered one day for each sex, I would not be violating college or state rules. And so, since the spring of 2001, I’ve held these all-male and all-female days in most of my sections of women’s history.

I’ll blog about the all-male day experience soon. I can say that the all-female experience is almost always an enormously positive one. Over and over again, I read in student journals and evaluations that that was their “favorite day” of the whole semester. Though I rarely issue sweeping pronouncements about what feminism is or isn’t, I am adamant that one can’t be much of a feminist if one is committed to the liberation of women as a class but one doesn’t generally like individual women. The whole “loving humankind, hating people” deal is thoroughly incompatible with every imaginable category of feminist praxis. And yet so many of my female students do struggle to bond and connect with other women. The “all my good friends are guys” contingent is invariably a substantial one.

A single day of sitting in a circle and sharing stories doesn’t create instant feminist community. But it sure as heck is a good start, and sadly, it’s often more sharing and listening in an all-female group than many of these young women have ever done before. I feel quite strongly that a feminist classroom has elements of the therapeutic as well as the intellectual; personal experience, while not a substitute for reason, is also a valuable source of information and knowledge. Tears are not uncommon on all-female day; tears of sadness, of exhaustion, of empathy.

Unlike at a major university, we have no “discussion sections” built into the course. I get 75 minutes twice a week to cover American women’s history (and contemporary feminism) from the pre-Columbian period to the present day. There is no other course on campus that surveys women’s history or offers an introduction to women’s studies. But as precious as the short amount of time I have is, it’s worth taking two days to reflect together, to retreat from the purely intellectual to the emotional. Laughter, tears, and authentic catharsis have their place in the feminist classroom.

It’s hard to be a Christian alone. It’s hard to be a feminist alone. Living out a commitment — whatever that commitment is based on — is more easily done with a community of the like-minded to encourage and nurture. Given that I teach at a community college that has an almost complete absence of feminist or pro-feminist institutional support for young men and women, I’ve got to try and create that institutional support in the classroom.

We had a great all-female day on May 15. I’ll have some more thoughts on working with young men in a feminist setting next week.

“I feel…”: the introduction of emotion in the classroom

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 5, 2006
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Teaching
. 28 Comments

This morning, I gave my first full lecture in my women’s history course. In a course that is supposed to cover women in American society from the pre-Columbian period to the present, I have precious little time to deal with Native American women. I pick and choose anecdotes from a few important tribal groups: the Iroquois (we discuss their "menstrual temples") and the Arapaho (we talk about their apparent belief that a woman who died in childbirth deserved the same honors as a warrior slain on the battlefield). It’s challenging stuff, and I confess I go through it fairly quickly.

After about thirty minutes of lecture, I stop the class and ask if there any questions.  After dealing with those, I ask something else: I ask the students to talk about how the material we’ve just covered makes them feel. I stress that I’m not asking for intellectual analysis (that comes on the papers and the exams); I’m not asking for original insight. I’m asking for gut-level emotional responses.  At first the students seem shocked by the question, but pretty quickly they get rolling:

"I’m angry that I never learned this stuff until I was in college."  "I’m sad about the fact that my mother never taught me about menstruation, and she always shames me for it even now."  "I’m excited to think that there’s a completely different way to think about issues of reproduction, life and death."

The deliberate introduction of "feelings" and "emotions" into a classroom is controversial.   Many of my colleagues assume that the primary job of the professor is to impart information and teach students to reason.   Developing critical thinking skills, they argue, involves teaching students to restrict their emotional responses to the material.  "Feelings are not facts", we are supposed to say, urging our students to adopt the dispassionate "view from nowhere."

Many of my colleagues who teach women’s history or gender studies are ambivalent about encouraging strong expressions of emotion in the classroom.  They are fearful that the academic validity of their courses will be called into question if they value feelings as much as rational arguments in class discussions.  A classic criticism of women’s studies is that as a subject, it lacks intellectual heft; encouraging students to explore their emotional responses seems to add fuel to the anti-feminist fire.

I’m willing to defend the intellectual credibility of my sylllabus.  My past women’s history students will assure any doubters that the course is rigorous and demanding (three major papers, journals, a final).  But they will also admit that I push my students very, very hard emotionally. The feminist journey is not just a cognitive one that happens from the neck up — it is one that is felt in the heart and in the bowels.

I’ve often felt that I have an easier time integrating a discussion of emotion and feeling into class discussion than do some of my female colleagues.  It’s not that they don’t teach the same subject at least as well! It’s that when female teachers invite students to share their feelings, they risk being stereotyped as soft and insufficiently rigorous.   Though my MRA critics are surely convinced that I am intellectually soft, I worry less about their opinion than those of my colleagues and my students.  And I find that in both student and peer evaluations, the willingness to encourage emotional work in an academic setting is quite well-received.  I suspect that at least to some degree, my maleness allows me to "get away with" challenging traditional pedagogical rules.

I always put time limits on the "feeling discussion."   There’s a clear line between a classroom and the Oprah show, and though I am willing to walk up to that line, I’m not willing to cross it completely.  Those students who are made uncomfortable by blunt and powerful expressions of emotion from their classmates deserve some protection as well!

Reprint: Tampax, Virginity, and Teaching the Body

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 10, 2006
in Body, Feminist Pedagogy, Sexuality and Teaching
. 15 Comments

I’m on hiatus — at least from substantive blogging — until August 28.  Until then, I’m reprinting favorite posts from 2004 and 2005.

I spent an hour and fifteen minutes in Tuesday’s Women’s Studies class lecturing  on masturbation, menstruation, and tampons.  (If that don’t got your attention, don’t know what will!)

As I’ve written before, much of my Women’s History course focuses on shifting attitudes towards American women’s bodies.  Tuesday, we spent a fair amount of time reviewing the 19th century panic about women’s sexuality (spurred by the medical "discovery" of the clitoris by the medical profession). I blogged a year ago about some of the unhappy consequences of this panic over young women’s masturbation.

We then connected to this to the history of, of all things, the tampon.  The modern tampon was patented in 1931 by a Dr. Earle Haas, who later sold the patent to what would become the Tampax company.  The first commercially marketed tampons appeared on the market five years later.

What does this have to do with women’s sexuality?  One thing is at least anecdotally evident:  cultural background and openness about sexuality seems to play a critical role in whether or not young women begin to use tampons soon after menarche.  My Asian and Latina students (who comprise two-thirds of my female students) are extremely unlikely to have been encouraged to use tampons when they began to menstruate.  Most tell stories of mothers who insisted on pads, often claiming that the tampon was only to be used by women who had lost their virginity.  One gal shared that she began to use tampons when she was on the her high school dance team where the uniforms made them essential; she told of the horrified and amazed reactions of her friends, who were entirely Hispanic.  At the same time, "white girls" seemed much more likely to use tampons in early to mid-adolescence.  Many of these students are stunned when they hear the myths that their classmates from more culturally conservative backgrounds were raised with. 

This jives with the info in this 2000 Wall Street Journal article.  According to company figures:

While about 70% of women in the U.S., Canada and much of Western Europe use tampons, usage falls to the single digits in a handful of countries such as Japan and Spain, and it’s not even measurable in much of the world. Just 2% of women in Mexico, as throughout most of Latin America, use tampons.

Those figures seem to match the ethnic disparity I see in my classroom. 

Religious and cultural taboos are a hurdle: There is a persistent myth in many countries, for example, that if a girl uses a tampon, she might lose her virginity. "Everywhere we go, women say `this is not for senoritas,’ " says Silvia Davila, P&G’s marketing director for Tampax Latin America. They’re using the Spanish word for unmarried women as a modest expression for young virgins.

This concern crops up in countries that are predominantly Catholic, executives say. In Italy, for instance, just 4% of women use tampons. The Roman Catholic Church says it has no official position on tampons. Nonetheless, some priests have spoken out against the product, associating it with birth control and sexual activities that are forbidden by the Church. Indeed, Tampax faced objections from priests in the U.S. when it introduced tampons in 1936.

In many countries, women aren’t accustomed to spending on themselves, particularly for something they’ll throw out — and that costs a bit more than pads. Women must also understand their bodies to use a tampon. P&G is finding that in countries where school health education is limited, that understanding is hard won. P&G marketers say they often find open boxes of tampons in stores — a sign, P&G says, that women were curious about the product but unsure as to how it worked. (Bold emphasis is mine).

What I argue in my course is that tampon acceptance is linked to broader issues of acceptance of women’s bodies.  The real threat of the tampon is not that it will take a girl’s virginity!  Rather, it’s that a woman who learns how to use it must of necessity gain some knowledge of how she works "down there."    Denying young girls access to tampons is a small but tangible way of keeping them ignorant of their own bodies. In that sense, I argue, cultural hostility to tampons can be linked to cultural hostility to female masturbation.   When a woman uses a tampon, she rejects the idea that her body is something of whose processes she ought to be unaware; when she masturbates, she discovers not only pleasure, she discovers that her body truly belongs to her.

I’m always careful to check in on the comfort level my students have when we talk about these things.  Discussion of masturbation and menstruation, clitorises and tampons can be overwhelming in any setting, even more so with a male college professor leading the class.  But by God, it’s necessary!  One young woman wrote in her journal this week:  "It was a very interesting discussion.  I didn’t know we had a clitoris, or knew it was a word.   I think it’s a good thing to talk about."  (Emphasis mine.)  She’s not the first to write something like that.  Remember, these are college students, but they come from many different backgrounds and many parts of the world.

I try and choose my words carefully.  I don’t make assumptions or give direction to my students as to what they ought to do.  What kind of sanitary products to use, and whether to masturbate or not, are, of course highly personal decisions that should be made without professorial suggestion. Choosing a tampon over a pad is not an inherently feminist act.  One could also be a feminist and choose not to masturbate for spiritual reasons, a point I acknowledge. But ignorance and shame are never, ever congruent with the spirit of feminism.  They are the twin evils that we are struggling against.

But whatever our spiritual orientations, it’s vital in gender studies that we teach the history of the body.   It’s equally vital that we challenge our students’ cultural and sexual assumptions, even if, on occasion, we need to acknowledge some embarrassment when we do so.  (I always say it’s okay to laugh and it’s okay to blush.)  Above all, I want my students to continue the conversations that we begin in class with their friends and with their family members.  On topics so sensitive (pun intended), the best discussions will happen in more intimate settings than the classroom.  It’s my fervent hope that what we do in the class will stimulate many good cross-generational, cross-ethnic talks among women — and men.

Originally posted March 24, 2005