No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
In the current flowering of feminist writing, there is considerable debate about essentialism and constructivism. One consequence of this debate has been to divide feminist theorists and feminist teachers. On one side, feminist theorists assume that feminist pedagogy is essentialist because often seems to be founded on an ahistorical, uncritical celebration of a fixed female position, a stance many theorists find reductive and dangerous. On the other side, feminist teachers often assume that to do theory, to explore the linguistic, social, and political construction of women as gendered subjects, is to participate in an esoteric activity (at best) and an activity tainted by reliance on male methodology and philosophy (at worst). Therefore, despite the fundamental feminist assertion that knowledge cannot be separated from the knower, many feminist academicians continue to operate within a binary perspective, placing intellect against emotion, separating reason from expe rience, and, ultimately, setting theory against practice. As a result, important connections between feminist theory and practice are masked, and we lose sight of our common purposes. Furthermore, we lose sight of our students. Adrienne Rich observes that it is easier, especially for academically trained white women, to get an intellectual/political 'fix' on the idea of racism than to identify with black female experience: to explore emotionally as part of our own (Disloyal 281). I believe this split among feminists occurs, in part, because has also been easier for academically trained feminists to get a fix on abstract theories of gender construction than to explore the immediate implications of these theories for the lives of women students. While we have a profusion of feminist theoretical writing and a profusion of writing about feminist teaching and learning, we have little writing that seeks to connect the two or that demonstrates what might be the impact of feminist teaching and feminist theory on the lives of students in our composition and literature classes. To begin exploring what these connections might be and how feminist teaching and theory might influence students' lives, I became a participant observer in an undergraduate women's literature class taught by my col
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.