Engaging gender and Freire: from discoursal vigilance to concrete possibilities for inclusion

• In Event: New transdisciplinary readings of Freire

Proposal

This paper emerged from a larger in-press handbook on Freire. It asks, what is the purpose of the contemporary project of “reading” gender and Freire in conversation with each other?, noting examples of evidence of (some baseline of) continued public relevancy of the “currents.” What possibilities exist within this project to actually (in the sense of existing or occurring at this time) address concrete diverse manifestations of inequality, oppression, and discrimination? I believe that these currents’ shared theoretical and methodological attention to the power of language has proven to offer direct possibilities for confronting the intense intersections of the –isms and resulting concrete possibilities for liberation from them. Indeed, I argue that one of the shared strengths of the currents of gender studies and Freirean studies lies in their epistemological focus on, when necessary and often concurrently, recognizing, building on, debating, holding tight, and unbounding from both historical and contemporary internal currents with a self-subversive (Hale 2014) recognition that the same discoursal fluidity needed to address these issues will quickly render certain aspects of these analyses outdated.

A grounded coding of the Paulo Freire Encyclopedia (2008, 2012, 2015) (of which I am author of an entry) and supplemental sources was carried out, revealing how coding around gender reveals discoursal gaps in second and third level analyses of Freire around inclusiveness both within and beyond this theme.
I would like to note that one common result of coding is that often what is not found is more interesting than what is found. There was no mention of the differences in experience of gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, and experiences with different understandings of feminism/s; as well it revealed lack of work around intersectionalities, nor hetero- and cis-normativity.
I highlight issues to address to make more explicit discoursal spaces for inclusion, such as:
• Persisting binaries
• Expressions of relationships
• Progression of language/language sequencing which takes these issues for granted
• Lack of consideration of the politics of each of these terms, contextual issues around personhood
• Global discoursal discussions
• Pathologizing language
• Consideration in Northern contexts of the transformative potential of Southern linguistic constructions
• Lack of reflection of implications of gendered language in a reflection on Freire’s poetry
• Spaces for further analysis of Freire's less explored writings, including poetry, and other forms of literary expression of critical pedagogues who have followed in his tradition
• Perpetuating a collective “we”
• the work of critical translators so these pieces can better “talk” to each other (as I believe they are not absorbing the rich “nutrients” that the other pieces offer, and lead to some unnecessary gaps that may also contribute to this “plateau” pushing me to confront the history of citations on Freire and gender analysis from the 1990s onward, and to consider how my own work as part of collaborations across these geographical spaces could be situated in this conversation going forward).
To conclude, I consider the significance of this sort of meta-analysis in challenging this “plateau” of scholarship on Freire and gender.

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Institute of International and Comparative Education, Beijing Normal University