Pub Date : 2018-01-05DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.26.2-3.0213
Analisa Degrave
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Pub Date : 2018-01-05DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.26.2-3.0142
Barbara Lesavoy
Sex. Sex. Sex. I want to repeat this word three times because the letters s, e, and x, when combined to form the word “sex,” assume magnetic properties. Textually inscribed into course titles, the word “sex” grabs student interest and lures them in droves into women and gender studies classes. I am faculty in women and gender studies (WGST) at a comprehensive public university in western New York. I am a cisidentified1 female and gender nonconforming.2 One of the courses that I regularly teach, titled Sex and Culture, takes up the question of sex and gender identities as understood across geographies of person and place. The course serves the WGST major and minor in addition to several liberal arts student learning outcomes situated under the college General Education rubric. Even though the college boasts a growing WGST major and minor, the majority of the students enroll for General Education credit and are often new to and skeptical of WGST knowledge.3 When considering text adoption for this diversely enrolled course, I tend to examine material across genres of fiction and nonfiction from the humanities and social science disciplines. Questions I repeatedly ask myself include: What writings are new, diversely authored, and progressive to knowledge growth in the WGST field? What texts will be most engaging to students both new to and familiar with WGST? And what materials might students stick with versus abandon because of elevated theoretical discourse? This last question does not suggest that I want to water down or run away from deeper theoretical content, but indicates that a narrative approach to instruction can bring students into the theoretical depth that undergirds WGST knowledge. Like the word “sex,” narrative inscriptions on identity can pull students into the fold of the many theoretical complexities inherent to studying sex and gender identity. Susan Stryker, Judith Butler, and Lauren Berlant, detailed below, write on areas of feminist thought that form the theoretical lens that I use when teaching sex and gender identity. These scholars offer complex concepts that, if reading in isolation or alongside other social science texts, can alienate learners. As a means to Bloom’s Normal (2002) and Tarttelin’s Golden Boy (2013): Teaching Gender Fluidity Written across Time and Text
性。性。性。我想重复这个单词三次，因为字母s, e和x，当组合成单词“sex”时，具有磁性。“性”这个词被铭刻在课程名称中，吸引了学生的兴趣，并吸引他们成群结队地进入女性和性别研究课程。我是纽约西部一所综合性公立大学女性与性别研究(WGST)的教员。我是一名性别不符合的女性我经常教授的一门课程名为《性与文化》(Sex and Culture)，讨论的是跨地域、跨地域理解的性别和性别认同问题。本课程服务于WGST专业和辅修课程，以及学院通识教育标题下的几个文科学生的学习成果。尽管学院拥有越来越多的WGST专业和辅修专业，但大多数学生注册通识教育学分，并且对WGST知识往往是新手和持怀疑态度在考虑这门招生多样化的课程的文本采用时，我倾向于研究人文和社会科学学科的小说和非小说类材料。我反复问自己的问题包括:在WGST领域，哪些作品是新的、作者多样的、对知识增长有促进作用的?哪些文本对新学生和熟悉WGST的学生最有吸引力?哪些材料会因为理论论述的提升而被学生们坚持而放弃?最后一个问题并不意味着我想淡化或逃避更深层次的理论内容，而是表明，叙事教学方法可以将学生带入支撑WGST知识的理论深度。就像“性”这个词一样，关于身份的叙述性铭文可以把学生拉进研究性别和性别认同所固有的许多理论复杂性的圈子里。苏珊·斯崔克、朱迪思·巴特勒和劳伦·伯兰特，详细介绍了女权主义思想的领域，这些领域构成了我在教授性和性别认同时所使用的理论视角。这些学者提供了复杂的概念，如果单独阅读或与其他社会科学文本一起阅读，可能会疏远学习者。作为布鲁姆的《正常》(2002)和塔特林的《金童》(2013)的一种手段:跨时间和文本的性别流动性教学
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Pub Date : 2018-01-05DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.26.2-3.0156
A. Gold
“I wouldn’t pay for that class.” That was the response offered by a male acquaintance when I described my composition course: one that situates feminist and queer theory as a lens through which to view, analyze, and discuss contemporary television. I brushed off his remark. In fact, I would have dismissed it entirely as a bit of casual or unconscious patronizing if not for a similar conversation several weeks later with a female acquaintance. She assured me that though she had loved a similar class at her Ivy League college, she couldn’t imagine “wasting her parents’ money” pursuing such topics and instead opted for a more practical route in engineering. Though anecdotal, such comments point to larger issues with which those of us in the humanities are all too familiar: the delineation of “serious” and “frivolous” studies or of “employable” and “unemployable” majors. These comments perhaps attest as well to the rise of the “neoliberal university” scholars have adeptly described: an increasingly corporate, market-driven academy, in Brenda R. Weber’s neat assessment, “where students can prove to a potential employer that they qualify as good workers” and where “professors . . . who aim to address complex social and intellectual issues are often met with hostility and/or denigrated as liberal or old-fashioned” (128). Of course, this denigration is not new. Cultural studies scholars have long discussed the problems the field faces in defining itself as a serious area of study, and they have renewed our sense of its centrality (Barker; Couldry; Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler). Still others have queried and fortified the specific role of popular culture in the classroom (Alvermann, Moon, and Hagwood; Buckingham; Buckingham and Sefton-Green; Giroux). Most important, we have come to understand that the issue that has plagued cultural studies and much of the humanities—the presumptuous designation of “proper” and “improper” subjects of inquiry—re/ produces the central concerns of feminist, Not Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Integrating Feminist Theory, Popular Culture, and Writing Pedagogy
“我不会为那门课付钱的。”当我描述我的写作课程时，一位男性熟人给出了这样的回答:这门课程将女权主义和酷儿理论作为一个视角，通过它来观察、分析和讨论当代电视。我不理会他的话。事实上，如果不是几周后我和一位女性熟人进行了类似的谈话，我会完全把它当作一种随意或无意识的屈尊俯就而不予理睬。她向我保证，虽然她在常春藤盟校也喜欢上类似的课程，但她无法想象“浪费父母的钱”去学习这样的主题，而是选择了一条更实用的道路——工程学。尽管是坊间传闻，但这些评论指出了我们这些人文学科的人都非常熟悉的更大的问题:“严肃”和“无聊”的研究或“可就业”和“不可就业”专业的划分。这些评论或许也证明了学者们所熟练描述的“新自由主义大学”的兴起:在布伦达·r·韦伯(Brenda R. Weber)简洁的评估中，这是一个日益企业化、市场驱动的学院，“学生可以向潜在雇主证明他们有资格成为好员工”，“教授……那些致力于解决复杂的社会和知识问题的人经常遭到敌意和/或被诋毁为自由主义者或过时的人。当然，这种诋毁并不新鲜。文化研究学者长期以来一直在讨论这个领域在将自己定义为一个严肃的研究领域时所面临的问题，他们已经更新了我们对其中心地位的认识(巴克;科尔迪;Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler)。还有一些人质疑并强化了流行文化在课堂中的具体作用(阿尔弗曼、穆恩和哈格伍德;白金汉宫;白金汉和塞顿-格林;吉鲁)。最重要的是，我们已经认识到，困扰文化研究和许多人文学科的问题——武断地指定“适当”和“不适当”的研究主题——重新产生了女权主义者的核心关注，而不是我们的定期计划:整合女权主义理论、流行文化和写作教学法
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Pub Date : 2017-05-03DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.26.1.0001
Lisa A. Costello
I began my career in rhetoric and composition at Georgia Southern University, a noncollective bargaining, medium-sized, regional university in southeast Georgia with about twenty thousand students. I started my job with what I thought were eyes wide open; that is, I believed what I read in graduate school. Academia was known for its ruthless competition, but departments protected their junior faculty. Academia was filled with highly educated people, so it valued progressiveness and equality. Within two months of being on the job, I learned that the academic workplace was even more difficult to navigate as a woman precisely because of these myths. My eyes were not wide open at all; I began my job essentially blind. In my first semester, my department chair assigned me to eight different department and college committees. The reduced course load I had negotiated in the hiring process had to be renegotiated every semester instead of being a given for the first three years. The mentor I was assigned my first semester refused to meet with me. My chair was fired, and we got an interim. We got one new dean and then another. We hired a new chair, who was brought up on fraud charges two years later. We got another dean and another interim chair. This long chain of specific events and rotating administrators is probably unusual, but the instability I felt as a new hire was probably not. I felt alone and unmoored, which overlaid my already potent anxiety about teaching well, publishing often, and serving admirably in my new position. Since my institution did not provide any formalized mentoring, I sought out any mentorship that could help me navigate the institutional expectations toward tenure and promotion and support me as a junior faculty member, but it was hard to find. Once I reached associate professor status, I thought my anxiety and workload might abate slightly, so that I could pursue innovation as a teacher-scholar. Unfortunately, in such cases, women are often asked to increase their duties across campus, because of their institutional experience or “demonstrated leadership abilities” that tenure formalizes. When I earned tenure, I was immediately asked
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Pub Date : 2017-05-03DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.26.1.0029
Victoria Pileggi, Joanna Holliday, Carm de Santis, A. LaMarre, Nicole K. Jeffrey, M. Tetro, Carla M. Rice
Feminist classrooms have become scholarly spaces where instructors, committed to the principles and processes of feminism, are able to seek out and employ creative ways to engage with teaching and learning processes (Gardiner 411). These classrooms are designed to be responsive to students’ needs, experiences, and ways of being (Bryson and Bennet-Anylkwa 133; Hobbs and Rice, “Rethinking” 139), while also inviting instructors to “experiment with new, sometimes risky, pedagogical approaches” (Mahar and Thompson Tetreault 2). Feminist pedagogues value, recognize, and encourage each student’s voice, and they view students as active participants in the learning process (hooks, qtd. in Donadey 83). Transformative processes are implicated in undertaking, establishing, and instituting change on individual, collective, and structural levels in feminist classrooms (Hobbs and Rice, “Introduction” xviii). On a structural level, Carolyn Shrewsbury writes: “[f]eminist pedagogy ultimately seeks a transformation of the academy and points toward steps, however small, that we can all take in each of our classrooms to facilitate that transformation . . . [By centralizing] three concepts, community, empowerment, and leadership . . . [as] a way of organizing our exploration into the meaning of feminist pedagogy” (9–10). Shrewsbury encourages feminist pedagogues to resist the structural constraints inherent in traditional learning environments and to create spaces that generate transformative learning for students and instructors. In so doing, feminist pedagogies can shift orthodox arrangements and practices in the academy. By creating a learning environment that is attuned to power dynamics and structures, feminist pedagogy can generate provisional communities. Shrewsbury conceptualizes such communities as those wherein “both autonomy of self and mutuality” (12) of members’ learning and developmental needs can be met by consensual “participatory and democratic” (13) processes, regardless of Becoming Scholars in an Interdisciplinary, Feminist Learning Context
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Pub Date : 2017-05-03DOI: 10.5406/FEMTEACHER.26.1.0072
Jonathan Branfman
While many instructors closet stigmatized identities, others downplay them—a tactic that sociologist Erving Goffman terms “covering.” What are the personal, ethical, and pedagogical costs of covering? What are the gains? How can feminist university instructors cover stigmatized identities without fueling oppressive respectability politics against their own communities? These are the questions that confront me as an openly gay university instructor, as well as nearly all teachers who do not fit what Audre Lorde calls “the mythical norm”: “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (11). Any instructor outside this narrow norm, as well as those who are not ablebodied and neurotypical, cisgender, and native-born citizens of the countries where they teach, may face pressures to cover in the classroom. To help navigate these challenges, I propose a “pedagogy of uncovering”: strategically covering to gain students’ respect, and later explicitly “uncovering” to help students deconstruct the very respectability politics that make covering exigent. I am fortunate to teach in a progressive setting where coming out as gay does not instantly discredit me in the eyes of most students. However, even once I am “out,” I find that students take me more seriously when I pitch my voice in a deeper register, minimize my hand gestures, and avoid gay buzzwords like “fabulous.” In other words, covering has pedagogical value for me: Even when I state my gay identity, and even when I specifically teach about LGBTQIA topics, I find that students take me most seriously when I censor my speech and behavior to avoid culturally constructed markers of gayness. I worry that if I let myself come off as more stereotypically gay, students will interpret me as a trivial amusement rather than a real person with real knowledge to share. And if students dismiss me this way, how can I effectively challenge their stereotypes about LGBTQIA people or encourage them to critically analyze the notion of essentialist gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability categories? From this perspective, “(Un)Covering” in the Classroom: Managing Stigma Beyond the Closet
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