Curriculum Feminisms: Tangles of Transgenerational Relationalities

• In Event: 34.023 - Curriculum History as Memory Work: Deterritorializing the Field

Abstract

Because curriculum conceptions and constructions never stand still or alone, I take curriculum and its “histories” as tangles of relationalities. Such tangles evidence “a thousand tiny intersections” that belie any linear temporality (van der Tuin, 2015, p. xiii), and thus reject assumptions of automatic progression and “newness” that purportedly necessitate a “supercessionary break with the old” because of having “no debts and no past, a clean break of ideas” (Barad, 2012, p. 13).
I here propose to analyze several versions of curriculum feminisms that spawn(ed) collaborative projects and practices that evidence these tangles of relationalities. In part, I locate these relationalities as trans-generational practices and influences that can include transversal generational dynamics, wherein the “newer” can inform and mentor, in myriad ways, the “more seasoned” (van der Tuin, 2015). Thus, rejecting negative connotations of generationality, approaching curriculum feminisms and their histories as tangles of relationalities may well function as generative in engaging not only with “the new,” with embodied and embedded relations in the real world (Braidotti, 2013), but also with the “already generated.” I thus propose tangles of relationalities as one way of conceptualizing curriculum histories that acknowledge impossibilities of leaving behind, or turning away from, matters of inheritance and indebtedness in any reconfigurings of present, past, and futures of the curriculum field. Instead of reinforcing binaries, such as past/present, and fixed boundaries requiring sameness and therefore rejections of any version of “other,” curriculum history conceived as tangles of relationalities involves an ethics of alterity that considers dis/continuities as fresh openings to possible open-ended affirmations and narrations of the Other (Barad, 2012, Butler, 2005; 2015).
Impelling my analyses too are insights from those who currently are challenging (Hekman, 2014; Hemmings, 2011; Hendry, 2011; Scott, 2011; van der Tuin, 2015) typical descriptions of feminist histories, writ large, that have employed predominant Western temporal narratives, wherein time is expressed grammatically in the form of tenses – past, present, future – that assume “continuity and unidirectionality of causality from past to present” (Scott, 2011, p. 42). Thus feminisms most often have been located as having existed and continuing to manifest as successive “waves” of activism, each wave (and successive generation) often being positioned as distinct and “better” than those in “the past.”
Inspired then by work that both disputes and offers fresh perspectives on such linear conceptions of “history,” I here especially draw on the work of both Karen Barad (2012) and Judith Butler (2005; 2015), who themselves have been positioned as oppositional representatives of generational tensions and successor narratives. However, both scholars, albeit differently, point to ethics of relationalities that emphasize responsibility to the entanglements, chosen as well as un-chosen, inherited as well as currently generated, human and non-human, of which we are a part. These are the kinds of relational tangles in curriculum feminisms that I here propose to examine and to address.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University