Belonging, Nonbelonging, and Organic Relationality: Women Scholars' Inspirations for Curriculum Work

• In Event: Curriculum Scholars, Literature, and the Women Who Have Influenced/Inspired Us: Commemorating Dreams and Necessities

Abstract

In the Western academia the singularity of scholarship is expected. We have to mark ourselves differently from others in order to claim our scholarly existence. In other words, a strong sense of non-belonging—as much as we lament it and that we want to belong—becomes necessary for doing “good” scholarly work. We do claim our intellectual lineages and acknowledge our intellectual parents’ influences, but at the end of the day, it is the “I” that we hope to capture the attention of the room. In this presentation, I will draw upon three important intellectual foremothers—Julia Kristeva, Madeleine Grumet, and Janet Miller—to discuss how women scholars’ re-formulation of both dwelling/belonging and mobility/non-belonging through relationships and alienation have influenced my curriculum view on the central role of organic relationality in curriculum. Narratives and autobiographical writings will be woven throughout presentation.

As a psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva (1991) argues that women may have more difficulty to have access to femininity than men because women are strangers in a patriarchal society that is ruled by reason. However, this non-belonging also gives women an advantage from which to transform femininity from a site of self-negation into a creative site for generating new thoughts. Working through loss and forming an intimate relationship with the archaic maternity, women bring vitality to the dynamics between the semiotic and the symbolic that must be sustained for meaningful life (Kristeva, 2002). Kristeva’s position of women as stranger affirms the role of non-belonging and her work on intimacy in revolt also takes us to the timeless time we belong to before we are born.

Madeleine Grumet (1988), a curriculum scholar who draws upon both phenomenology and psychoanalysis, uses the tradition of bitter milk as an analogy for women teacher’s contradictory position because schooling delivers children to the paternal order. To live with such contradiction differently, she suggests that we think back through our mothers and claim what has been repressed by the system. Thinking through our mothers—recognizing their influence but not repudiating or identifying with them—is a project of mediating between belonging and non-belonging to embrace creative expressions of both femininity and masculinity.

Janet Miller (2005) advocates breaking the unnatural silence of women in education and building collaboration among women but approaches subjectivity as always multiple, contradictory, and fluid. From a post-structural feminist view, Miller (2010) further proposes a vision for a community without consensus, which acknowledges the importance of constructing a communal space in which all can participate but refuses any universal notion of the self and the collective. If dissent and dispute are organic elements of a community, then will members feel belonged? Or not belonged? Or does it matter? Belonging or not belonging is a complicated affair in a community of difference.

In positing organic relationality—that allows both connections and disconnections—as the central lens to re-examine curriculum work, I propose a non-dual approach to belonging/non-belonging—not collapsing them into one yet not approaching them as separate—that points to a pathway of sustainable scholarship for a more nonviolent world.

Author

• Hongyu Wang, Oklahoma State University - Tulsa