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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel attempts to make feminist, queer, and/or crip sense of how conservatives are appropriating liberal rhetoric for decidedly anti-feminist ends and, likewise, how liberal or progressive discourse is folding in language and politics that more nearly reflect political conservatism. This can be seen in our classrooms when students identified as radical activists deploy “trigger warnings,” calls for “safe space,” and rhetorics of accessibility in ways divorced from a politics of collectivity and interdependence and premised, instead, on a service model of education in which instructors are expected to deliver “safety” and “access” to consumer-students. It can also be seen in the ways that students identified with the right are taking up the language of “civility,” “diversity,” and “academic freedom” to demand protections as a vulnerable population struggling to survive on notoriously leftist college campuses. While we find the proactive obscuring of political meaning quite troubling (especially in the age of “alternative facts”), this panel is designed neither to denounce the naiveté of these students nor to diagnose the errors of their dissenting ways. Rather, our papers respond to these trends by proposing pedagogical strategies for building classrooms where meaningful conversations about “safety,” “accessibility,” and “personal experience” facilitate, rather than foreclose, critical discussions of violence and transnational analyses of power relations.

Situating our individual classroom experiences within the administrative landscapes of our respective universities and the broader context of US national politics, our papers identify some of the challenges facing women’s, gender, and sexuality studies professors at public institutions in the United States while also exploring the pedagogical possibilities that become available via interdisciplinary crip, queer, and feminist approaches. Ellen Samuels opens the panel by asking how crip conceptualizations of safety might provide a framework for creating learning experiences that neither sever the emotional from the intellectual nor privilege personal feelings over the rigorous work of analysis. Tristan Josephson then turns our attention to the feelings of a newly emerging student population—Trump feminists—and asks why we might need to take seriously their sense of “unsafety” in women’s studies classrooms if we want to engage conservative students in the hopes of complicating their understandings of precarity. Shifting our focus to a very different set of students, Kiran Asher and Lezlie Frye outline pedagogical strategies for pushing back against the revived investment in “authentic” experience they have witnessed among self-proclaimed radical feminists on their campus and what they interpret as a retreat to the safety of a political project that obscures ambiguity and contradiction. Lisa Diedrich concludes our panel by describing her successes in teaching dis/ability studies as a way of moving students beyond uncritical attachments to identity and inviting them to grapple with multiplicities and to imagine newly ethical ways of being in the world. As chair and commentator, Liz Montegary will add critical depth by drawing upon her research and teaching experience at the nexus of feminist and queer theory and critical disability studies.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Liz Montegary, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Individual Presentations

• Our Classrooms, Ourselves: Embodied Pedagogy in the Age of Trump - Ellen Samuels, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Teaching "Trump Feminists" - Tristan Josephson, California State University, Sacramento

• Power, Politics, and Push-back in Feminist Classrooms - Kiran Asher, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Lezlie Frye, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

• Teaching Dis/ability in Trump's America - Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Comment

• Liz Montegary, Stony Brook University (SUNY)