An Open Letter on Feminist Pedagogy
Jennifer Cotter
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Winter 1993-1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 6-9) | ||
| • September 23, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Dear Professor —————,
As is customary at the end of each semester you have asked your students to evaluate your course in feminist theory. From the specificity of the questions you ask on your evaluation sheet it appears as if you want a very serious response to both the course content (its readings, discussions, paper presentations, etc.) and your pedagogical practices. In order to give you such a serious response, I think it is necessary to begin by problematizing a few of the limitations of the institution of “course evaluations” and to attempt to move beyond these limitations in this text.
Typically, in the space of course evaluations, the criteria by which we determine our assessment of a particular course are not made explicit. In fact, as these evaluations are considered to be “private” exchanges between faculty members and individual students, this set of criteria, if considered at all, is understood to be a product of the “personal” “likes” and “dislikes” of the particular student responding. You, in fact, seem to share this understanding of the institution of the “course evaluation” as on your course evaluation sheet you often ask each of us to describe what we “like most” and “like least” about particular aspects of the course. This, I would argue, is problematic because it does not investigate that which gives rise to particular “likes” and “dislikes,” and in not doing so it relegates these responses to the domain of the personal, idiosyncratic “opinion.” This conceals the ideological production of “likes” and “dislikes” and relieves the pressure from students and faculty alike to account for their “likes” and “dislikes,” and the way these may come into conflict with others’ “likes” and “dislikes” in the space of the classroom. In other words, it assumes that the only response a student can have is in fact a personal idiosyncratic “opinion” rather than a well thought out, progressive, and politically decisive position. In doing so, this allows students to not have to account for why (towards what ends and what interests) they would evaluate a course in a particular way. More importantly however, insofar as these exchanges are institutionally understood as “personal” and “private,” this allows faculty members not to have to account for their pedagogical practices in relation to what may in fact be a well thought out, progressive, and politically decisive position. Under such circumstances, such a position when articulated as a “critique” of the professors practices, can be dismissed as simply a “personal” problem with the professor herself.
In order to move beyond these problems and limitations, this text and its publication in the Alternative Orange marks a refusal to participate in the institution of the “course evaluation” as a private exchange and instead makes this response available to public contestation over the political. This is because I understand both your pedagogical practices, and my response to them as informed by contesting political positions not “personal idiosyncrasies” (and, in fact, you yourself have expressed agreement with this presupposition in class). To make these positions part of public debates, rather than accept the anti-feminist “professionalizing” criteria which you have used to determine the “effectivity” of graduate courses, it is necessary to evaluate the effectivity of your course with an explicitly political set of criteria; one that takes your expressed commitment to feminism seriously by holding this course and your pedagogical practices accountable to the project of emancipating women.
However, it must be recognized that feminism—and its “political effectivity”—occupies a contested terrain and therefore its meaning cannot be taken for granted. In order to evaluate your course’s political effectivity toward the emancipation of women—and to come up with the criteria with which to do so—it is first necessary to understand the world in which such a course generates its effects. Specifically, it is necessary to understand the conditions, in this world, that give rise to and maintain the continued existence of the oppression and exploitation of women all over the globe. In short, we must look at the global set of relations—late “multinational” capitalism—which determines what “this world” consists of.
Capitalism, in order to maintain the reproduction and accumulation of capital, fundamentally relies on—and hence, works to (re)produce—a division of labor in which the majority of the people on the planet (those who are separated from the means of production and, as a result, have only their labor-power to sell in order to survive) are subject to the determination and control of a class who privately owns the means of production. Capital is further maintained by the extension of this division of labor through the proliferation of a multiplicity of labor divisions within the working class. These further divisions serve, on the one hand, to raise productivity for the capitalist through increased specialization and standardization of the production process, and, on the other hand, to decrease resistance to capitalist rule by producing “one-sided” subjects who possess “specialized knowledges” of their particular “job” without an understanding of the apparatus that necessitates such knowledges. This specialization enables the increased subordination of the working class to capitalist domination. Along with these “technical” divisions in “jobs”, capital also relies upon ideological divisions among workers which serve to both break down working class solidarity and “naturalize” the super-exploitation of sectors of the proletariat. Capital must produce a super-exploitable sector of the proletariat that can be drawn in and out of the workforce—in opposition to other sectors of the proletariat—depending on the (relatively) short term needs of the capitalist class as determined by the forces of the market. In order for this process to be “naturalized” and maintained, this material division must be supplemented by ideological divisions which work to produce subjectivities who will defend these divisions as “natural” and “inevitable.” Capitalism, in this case, has made use of and (re)produced historically available “differences” such as “race” and “gender”—“differences” that it drastically extends, proliferates, and elaborates upon—in order to insure the continued existence of a super-exploitable labor force.
In the shift to late “multinational” capitalism these “differences” have become increasingly useful to the ruling class. In short, since capitalism has entered into a period of economic stagnation and decline, and the actualization of capital has become a much more complex process, inter-capitalist competition has intensified considerably in order to maintain existing rates of profit. This period of decline, then, has given rise to a shift in labor relations in which, increasingly, capitalists are moving out of advanced capitalist (i.e., “first world”) nations and setting up production sites in the so called “third world.” Part of this move has entailed the proletarianization of large numbers of poor, relatively young women of color living in the “third world.” Here capital not only makes use of these historically produced “differences” to “pull together” the cheapest labor force possible but also works toward the reproduction of these differences through the super-exploitation of this sector of the labor force. One way in which this is maintained is that, capital, which has become increasingly mobile, can be shifted to various areas around the globe according to which will actualize the most profit (i.e., where the cheapest labor can be extracted). Insofar as this “mobility” is often used to counteract local-level resistance to exploitation, these shifts do not merely enable the capitalist class to “find” a super-exploitable population, but in fact they create the conditions necessary for the production of this sector of the working class. That is, these shifts have engendered a tremendous unevenness in development in which the majority of people on the planet—and increasingly women of color living in the “third world”—are subordinated to the interests of a relatively small international ruling class.
Feminism’s political effectivity, then, must be determined in relation to this global framework; feminism must be a project that is concerned not with the personal liberation of a small group of relatively privileged women, but with the economic, social, and political emancipation of all oppressed and exploited women on the planet. Hence, the measure of success for feminism must always be determined in relation to its capacity to advance the material interests of the most oppressed segments of the female population on the globe. In order to determine what a course in “feminist theory” can do to work towards these ends and interests it is first necessary to situate the university—in which such a course is located—within this global framework of late “multinational” capitalism.
The university in “advanced” capitalist countries is one of the primary sites for the ideological reproduction of capitalist social relations. In short, the “advanced” capitalist university primarily works toward the production of knowledges that support, and subjectivities that will uncritically participate in, capitalist social relations. This is facilitated by the fact that the university occupies a space of “separation” and “alienation” from other aspects of material life which “is itself a consequence of the university’s function as the site at which the resources and labor necessary for the production of knowledges have been concentrated, placed under the control of a small elite, and subordinated to the economic and political ends of the capitalist class” (MCSU, “Capitalism and Your University Education,” Alternative Orange, vol. 3, no. 1, 10-11). As a result, many of the knowledges produced within the bourgeois academy are highly specialized knowledges which are abstracted from both the conditions which make this specialization possible, and the ends and interests that this specialization serves.
In order for a feminist theory course to work against the dominant interests of the university and contribute to the ends and interests of a transformative feminist project, it must facilitate the production of knowledges that can explain social contradictions and hence enable subjects to understand and intervene in existing social configurations, in order to transform these social relations and work toward the production of a society in which all men and women alike have ownership and control over the means of self-determination. That is, it must produce knowledges that enable the fundamental transformation of capitalist economic and social relations which work to marginalize, oppress, and exploit the majority of human beings—and particularly women—on the planet. With this in mind, I am evaluating this course and your pedagogical practices on the basis of what I argue is the only politically useful set of criteria for a feminist theory course at this historical moment: whether or not it facilitates the production of the oppositional theoretical knowledges necessary in order to enable its members to engage in the collective struggle for the emancipation of all oppressed and exploited women.
This text, then, is in part a critique of a tendency that works to counteract this goal; a tendency which is manifested in and supported by your pedagogical practices. This tendency has developed both within the broad sphere of “the left,” and within feminism in particular. This tendency represents a shift away from a transformative feminist politics which seeks to fundamentally change the social conditions that maintain the continued oppression and exploitation of women. Such a project requires a rigorous theoretical investigation and explanation of the objective conditions of existence (political, social, and economic) that give rise to and maintain particular forms of subjectivity and experience within relations of exploitation. Simultaneously this tendency is a move toward a compensatory feminist politics which aims to “make up” for the damages done to women in patriarchal social relations—without actually transforming these social relations—by creating spaces in which the “experience” of these relations can be expressed. Such a project focuses on the effects or “experience” of oppression and exploitation while abstracting these from their socio-economic causes. In other words, this tendency has been a move toward the description of particular forms of subjectivity and experience without explanation of the conditions that give rise to these forms. Projects that focus on how to give expression to the experience of oppression are set up in fundamental opposition to those projects which take the experience of oppression seriously by explaining what produces it. This tendency then has the potential to move feminism in a direction in which it is no longer capable of contributing to our knowledge of the conditions that determine this experience. If feminism is no longer capable of doing this, then it cannot enable us to determine the means and strategies by which we can intervene in and transform the socio-economic conditions which maintain the continued oppression and exploitation of women.
In order to clarify the problems and limitations of this shift I will engage in a critique of the pedagogical practices that you make use of which are representative of this shift. I recognize that you—as a compensatory feminist—object to this very mode of engagement. This, then, is precisely where we should begin…. Allow me, briefly, to remind you of the response you gave to the series of contestations made throughout the semester between a “pedagogy of critique” (the mode of engagement for transformative feminism) and a “pedagogy of support” (the mode of engagement for compensatory feminism) (for further discussion of the debate between “supportive pedagogy” and a “pedagogy of critique” see: Donald Morton, “On ‘Hostile Pedagogy,’ ‘Supportive Pedagogy,’ and ‘Political Correctness’,” Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, no. 2, 1992, pp 79-94) that culminated in both an open letter to the class written by a student arguing for the necessity of a “pedagogy of critique” in the feminist classroom that would enable students to move beyond the particular limitations they have in their intellectual and political development as feminists, and the extended discussion that arose about and around this letter/issue (a discussion that explicitly pressured you to more publicly explain, account for, and defend your own argument in favor of “supportive feminist pedagogy”).
In your response you argued that critique is, among other things, “violent,” “hostile,” “personally trashing,” “authoritarian,” “elitist,” “racist,” and “masculinist.” According to you a “pedagogy of critique” is motivated by “white male arrogance.” This is the case, you argue, because a “pedagogy of critique”—insofar as it emphasizes the necessity of “theory” over “experience” as the basis of knowledge and subsequently argues that in order to end oppression of any kind it is not enough to descriptively “reveal” the experiences of the oppressed and marginalized, but instead it is necessary to investigate the material conditions of existence that give rise to such experiences—cannot effectively “account for” the “psychic pain” of the marginalized and oppressed.
Your understanding of a more enabling classroom for feminists is instead the classroom as a “safe space.” This classroom, you argue, is one based on mutual trust and respect; it is one that facilitates a feeling of “comfort” in which marginalized subjects feel “safe” to speak “their minds” without fear of challenge. In other words, you advocate for the classroom as a space to compensate for the damages done to marginalized subjects—in this case women—in oppressive social relations; a classroom which aims to produce knowledges which make students more conscious of women’s “experiences” particularly along lines of “difference” (e.g., race, sexuality, etc.) and furthermore creates a space in which these experiences—and the subjects who “own” them—can be validated and affirmed. Furthermore, you support this kind of classroom and pedagogy because of your commitment to both a philosophical and political eclecticism in which a variety of ways of approaching particular problems are accepted and combined together, and a “democratic pluralism” in which all “voices” should be equally heard and respected. In short, these pedagogical practices, you argue, are aimed toward a “radical decentering” of authority in which no one position, including your own, should take precedence over another, or series of other, positions. Lastly, you argue that this “decentering” is necessary in order to create an environment that will facilitate the personal and professional development of graduate students who occupy “identities” which have been historically marginalized within the academy. Indeed, on your course evaluation sheet you identify professionalism as the primary objective for this or any other graduate course.
Still, in contradiction to your commitment to an “open” pedagogy—a pedagogy in which all positions should be included—you argued that “critique” is an inappropriate form of engagement for your classroom and proclaimed that you would no longer allow those positions that advocate for it to be voiced in that space. Furthermore, in contradiction to your expressed commitment to “dialogue” and “anti-authoritarianism” you told the class that we would not use classroom time to discuss your position, as you did not care to hear our responses to, or—and especially—our critiques of your position (thus also relegating your so called “public” response to the domain of “the private”). Lastly, in contradiction to your expressed commitment to “pluralism” and “support” you announced that if anyone in the class disagreed with your position that she should not: take any classes from you again, expect support in working on a thesis, “dossier paper,” or dissertation with you, expect support for teaching assistantships etc., or ask you for a recommendation for any reason whatsoever.
This indicates that despite the appearance of your evaluation sheet, you in fact, do not want a serious engagement with the course and your pedagogical practices. You do not care to hear a response that takes your expressed commitment to feminism seriously, that takes the emancipation of women seriously enough to point out what, in your own practices as a “feminist pedagogue,” may have a low political effectivity in relation to this goal. You, in essence, “want to be left alone.” This can be seen even more clearly insofar as you prioritize active participation in the institution of the private evaluation sheet over and above active participation in the classroom as a public site of social contestation. That is, the moment when you take student’s responses/positions most “seriously” is when these responses are privatized and can be dismissed at your discretion; a moment when you do not have to respond publicly and account for your political and pedagogical practices in relation to any critiques made of them.
This blatant contradiction in practice to your expressed political commitments, as well as your refusal to engage with others, demonstrates a cynical and conservative response to pressing political questions. When pressure is put on your political position rather than responding by defending the necessity for your position, in a public space where others can respond, or perhaps rethinking your position in relation to the critiques advanced, in a cynical fashion you contradict your expressed commitment to “decentering” authority by violently reasserting this authority. In short, once a student articulates the necessity for a political and pedagogical project in opposition to your own, your position of relative institutional authority becomes quite clear as you are willing to use your institutional power to bar those who challenge you from continued participation in the academy. This, in effect, is the institutional limit to your expressed commitment to pluralism. While you purport to engage in pedagogical practices that “decenter” authority in the classroom, your own institutional authority is maintained on newer more “subtle” levels as “non-existent.” I would argue that insofar as you represent this relative institutional authority as “non-existent” your pedagogical practices, while in form are “decentering” and “anti-authoritative,” in content are authoritarian and manipulative.
This authoritarianism of a “pedagogy of support” functions on two levels. First, it functions inside the classroom, as I have mentioned above, by purporting to create a pluralist space in which all positions will be heard and respected, when in actuality this “inclusion” is predicated upon the condition that the positions articulated conform to the presuppositions of pluralism itself and also do not violate “supportive pedagogy” as you articulate it. That is, a discursive pluralism cannot accept those positions that are critical of its own presuppositions, and therefore in practice it contradicts its claims to complete “inclusivity.” Second, this authoritarianism functions not only within the parameters of the classroom but also in its effects beyond the classroom. This is the case insofar as “supportive pedagogy” produces knowledges that assume that somehow giving everyone the “right to speak” in the classroom (except those who exceed the limits it establishes) is enough to eradicate the conditions that give rise to the continued marginalization, oppression, and exploitation of women. In other words, your “supportive pedagogy” effectively blocks the production of those theoretical (non-experiential) knowledges which are necessary to transform patriarchal social relations. By blocking the production of these knowledges you effectively support these authoritarian social relations.
According to “supportive pedagogy” the use of “theory” to make sense of experience is considered a “violence”; specifically, it is violent because it “alienates” those who have already been marginalized from unmediated access to their own experience. This is the ground upon which you argue that critique (and its use of theory) is motivated by “white male arrogance.” You argue that theory, as such, “erases” the experience of women and people of color. However, this presupposes that experience contains within it the means by which it can be understood. In doing so, this effaces the fact that all subjects (and their forms of consciousness) are produced out of social structures and hence are given frames of intelligibility with which to interpret their particular experiences. That is, “individuals” do not contain unmediated access to their own experiences rather, their ways of “making sense” of the world are always mediated by ideological discourses. To refrain from consciously theorizing how experience comes about assumes that the frames of intelligibility that are provided in the cultural “common sense” are enough to adequately explain the social structures that give rise to experience, and the chain of mediations which determines our interpretation of this experience. However, the cultural “common sense” is precisely the frame of intelligibility produced to naturalize existing social structures. This is not to say that the “experience” of oppression should not be taken into account rather, the issue is how experience should be taken into account; that is, “theory… is not opposed to experience but is the necessary supplement of experience: theory historicizes experience and displays the social relations that have enabled it to be experienced as ‘experience’“ (Teresa Ebert, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies,” Cultural Critique, Oxford University Press, no. 23, pp. 13-14). By not theorizing the structures that give rise to the “individual” or “group” experiences of oppression these structures will remain implicit and continue to determine the future production of experiences of oppression and exploitation.
In a classroom that assumes that the only way to “include” women and people of color is to understand the classroom as a “safe space”—a space, in this case, “safe” from “critique” and “theory”—the only recourse students and teachers have when racist and sexist subjectivities “erupt” is to drive these students out of the classroom. This, however, presupposes that racism and sexism are simply the “bad attitudes” and “old habits” of a few corrupt individuals who are insignificant and “should not be dignified” with a response. Such arguments elide the fact that sexist and racist subjectivities and discourses exist and are actively legitimated on a mass scale in the academy by, for instance: departmental and college practices of denying tenure to professors who are people of color and female professors in general, and specifically those professors engaged in oppositional political work; the enforcement of “downsizing” in which females and people of color are often the first workers to be “let go”; the continued effects of “downsizing” in which those workers who remain “at the bottom”—often females and/or people of color—are expected to do more work for the same or sometimes less pay; the administration’s refusal to take punitive measures against those students who are convicted of committing rape, and its attempts to “privatize” campus related rapes and block support of survivors in pressing charges; not to mention the countless number of times that the university looks the other way when women and people of color who are faculty, staff members, and students are sexually and/or racially harassed by their bosses, colleagues, co-workers, professors, students, and peers.
It must be recognized however, that as the university does not exist in isolation, the existence and legitimation of sexist and racist discourses and practices within the university are made possible by the broader system of oppression in which women and people of color all over the globe have been the targets of ruthless exploitation. While increased ideological investments have been made in order to maintain an international division of labor they have also had extensive ramifications within advanced capitalist nations. These ramifications have served to support a ruthless “backlash” against the advancements of people of color and women in which the cultural resources mobilized to support this advancement have been severely “cut-back.” It is in part this “backlash” and the discourses that support it, that enable the continued existence and production of sexist and racist subjectivities within the “multicultural” academy. A pedagogy that works toward producing a “safe space” by dismissing sexist and racist subjectivities presupposes that these subjectivities and the system that they legitimate will “go away” if we simply ignore them. “Supportive pedagogy,” in essence, is a conservative response to this “backlash.” Insofar as it does not critique—and hence produce subjects who are capable of critiquing—the discourses and practices that mystify, legitimate, and maintain global oppression, a “supportive pedagogy” capitulates to this “backlash” by producing subjects who do not have the knowledges to account for and collectively intervene in the global exploitation of women and people of color.
However, “supportive pedagogy” cannot simply be seen as a capitulation, but, in fact, participates in the legitimation of this global exploitation. This is the case insofar as “supportive pedagogy” seeks to “include” only those who are already “relatively included” in relation to those outside of the academy. “Supportive pedagogy” which relies on an “anti-theory” theory, cannot provide the conceptual framework necessary to understand the historical causes of “experience” and instead purports to focus on the “experience” itself. If “experience” is not understood through the social relations that produce it, then it can only be understood as the “private property” of the individuals who experience it as “experience.” Even on its own terms then, “supportive pedagogy” can only “include” those who already have access to the academy; as those who are not in the academy cannot participate in this “safe space.” While the struggle for “inclusion” in the bourgeois academy can be difficult due to the “backlash,” the ruling-class can and ultimately will concede to demands for “inclusion” on the part of individuals who are already relatively included, as it is in their interests to concede. Since the demands of capital have permeated more areas and levels of human existence than ever before, the ruling class, in its increased investment in the ideological reproduction of capitalist social relations, must “update” its ideological legitimation to effectively “resolve” the contradictions and crises that erupt as a result of the “globalization” of capital. Now, not only must capital naturalize the “differences” of “race” and “gender” in order to produce super-exploitable sectors of the proletariat, but, in a global market, it must find new ways of managing the “unevenness” of this workforce. In order to “resolve”—or “conceal”—the conflicts and crises that arise from the contradiction between collective and private interests on a global scale, capital must produce an increasingly “multicultural” and “egalitarian” managerial class; a managerial class that is capable of negotiating and affirming “differences” in the interests of capital.
Ultimately, a compensatory feminist pedagogy that articulates its main aim and overall goal as the “professionalization” of students, marks a contribution to such a project. Professionalism, while it may require one to engage with a certain level of seriousness and rigor, also requires one to conform to particular codes in the academy—codes which require compromising one’s tone, approach, and level of contestation, interrogation, and intervention—so as not to offend and disrupt the existing order of the bourgeois academy. In this sense, becoming “professionalized” means to work in the service of the academic institution as it stands. As the interests of the academy at this historical juncture are (overwhelmingly) to produce subjects who will participate “willingly” and uncritically in capitalist social relations, “professionalism” is in direct opposition to a project concerned with the emancipation of all oppressed and exploited women which must necessarily work toward the transformation of capitalist social relations. I ask you: What, then, is at stake in the “unification” of “professionalism” and “feminism?” Such a “unification,” contrary to its claims to “inclusivity,” transforms feminism into a project that works against the material interests of the majority of women on the planet and towards the interests of a small group of relatively privileged women. A compensatory feminist project marks, not the “liberation” or “freedom” of women, but the suppression of oppositional discourses and the containment and silencing of transformative subjectivities engaged in the collective struggle to emancipate women.
In the struggle and against the silence,
Jennifer Cotter.
| ★ |
