Power, Politics, and Push-back in Feminist Classrooms

• In Event: Pedagogies under Pressure: Making Feminist/Queer/Crip Sense of “Safety” and “Accessibility”

Abstract

This paper explores how students are taking up what they are learning in gender and sexuality studies curriculum—feminist and queer critiques of power, poststructuralist approaches to social identity, radical practices of collective access, and theories of post- and de-colonization, to name a few examples—and in activist spaces, broadly conceived, and deploying them in unexpected and potentially troubling ways. Drawing on the dynamics in feminist theory seminars and upper-division coursework at the University of Massachusetts, we examine a series of recurrent responses to critical pedagogies that occur in the name of feminist activism and praxis. They include a reversion to anti-intellectualism, a rejection of theory and critique, and newly invigorated narratives of authentic experience, essentialist identity, and truth. Such responses conflate analysis and politics, reduce politics to activism or uncritical praxis, and conceive alternatives merely as recovery projects or as the authentic expression of the voice of the oppressed. Running counter to the deep, intersectional analyses of power that gender and sexuality studies foregrounds (and that students often invoke), they also yield various forms of policing not unknown to progressive communities. Indeed, they sometimes take the form of public critiques directed at feminist and queer cultural producers, professors, and others whose marginalization within the academy might more nearly position them as “allies.” This has raised a series of gnawing questions about the political and pedagogical work we are doing, how it is landing in the bodies and minds of students, and to what use they are deploying critical language and strategies that might fall under the rubric of “dissent.” In the long echo of Gayatri Spivak’s work, we are compelled to further interrogate how authoritative speech is being conceived in increasingly narrow ways. How might these phenomena be linked to what has perhaps become a norm of queer studies—that is, the tendency to direct our critical energies toward mainstream projects and inclusionary gestures—thereby training our students to search for the failures in any and all efforts to create change? Careful and sustained analysis is needed to examine how we intervene in such dynamics, and precisely how and why they have emerged as such in the current moment. In lieu of the turn towards “slow work,” what kinds of crip, queer, and or feminist impulses might shape pedagogies of dissent? What is the meaning and impact of “decolonizing” practices that threaten to function as a floating signifier when divorced from their historical and theoretical origins? At a time when ever more serious threats to critical thinking present themselves, it is imperative for us to grapple with teaching/learning the nuances of politics and of sitting productively with such ambiguities, contradictions of and within pedagogies of dissent.

Authors

• Kiran Asher, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

• Lezlie Frye, University of Massachusetts at Amherst