Perhaps before tackling the question of my title, I should address the question of whether feminism can or should be a liberal art.If we define the liberal arts approach as based on the belief that a thorough study of one’s culture will educate one intellectually, morally, and socially, the tension between such an approach and feminism is obvious.Who gets to define “one’s culture” or what constitutes intellectual, moral, or social excellence?Feminists are trained to be suspicious of such statements, and with good reason.For most of its history, “our culture” has offered lessons in prejudice, rigidity, complacency, tyranny, and rationalization of all the above.Feminist theory has aggressively and convincingly attacked the very foundations of our culture—shouldn’t women’s studies teachers follow suit?
In answer to this question, I have to fall back again and again on the truism that you have to understand something before you can critique it.I say this not because I feel one should “play fair” with one’s culture or even because one’s critical tools must ultimately derive from culture.Instead, I say this because most students coming into college don’t understand what it means to speak of a comprehensive “culture”; how such a “culture” constitutes not only thoughts, but ways of thinking that in turn influence ways of behaving; how a “system” of oppression differs radically from individual acts of oppression.For the women’s studies teacher, especially of an introductory course, to base her approach on a rejection of traditional culture is to omit a critical—in both senses of the word—lesson.To teach recovered female authors without teaching the male authors whose works obscured theirs, for instance, often gives students the impression that women’s studies instructors are not concerned with “real” history.However accurate that impression may be—certainly many women have found that canons of literature, history, and other disciplines fail to speak to them—there is a difference between realizing you are excluded from your culture’s history and not knowing what “culture’s history” means in the first place.To speak more broadly, how can one illustrate “phallologocentrism” to students who have yet to learn what it means for something to be logical, let alone centrist?
My solution to this problem is to teach feminism as a kind of critique, as a set of skills that can be applied not only to culture, but to feminism itself. To that end, I have three broad approaches:teach the conflicts, teach the critique of ideology, and model a critically engaged feminism.It’s my modest hope that, if students learn these lessons, their consciousness will necessarily be raised.I’d like to explain each approach briefly, giving some examples of how I employ them, before turning to some of the problems with these approaches and asking the audience for input on how these problems might be resolved.
1.Teach
the Conflicts
One way of approaching this dilemma is to apply Gerald Graff’s notion of teaching the conflicts—that is, to admit into classroom discourse the kind of dissension one sees in professional discourse.Again, this is not a question of “playing fair” with one’s culture, of ensuring that patriarchy gets as much class time as its opposites.Rather, it is a question of modeling debate.Debate—not simply critique.That is, it is simple enough to say, “Jerome thinks that women are evil temptresses.This is bad.”It is more difficult to say “We could argue that Jerome’s misogyny stems from his celibacy.But a critic might say that’s applying 20th-century pop psychology to a figure from the Middle Ages.Can we use the same standards to talk about Jerome as we would to talk about ourselves?”The distinction I’m making here is not one of the complexity of the questions the instructor puts forth, though conflicted questions will invariably be more complex than “yes or no” questions.What I wish to highlight about such questions is that they model how conflicting views enter into dialogue with each other. Using such debates as a starting point, one can simultaneously teach culture, critique it, and—most importantly—teach how to critique it.
2.Teach
the Critique of Ideology
On day one of my class, I introduce students to the concept of ideology, and I never let it drop.I begin by charting the differences between “real life”, image, ideal, and ideology—I usually have to provide a definition for the last, and I start with a dictionary definition that I later elaborate on. If Martha Stewart didn’t already exist, I’d have to invent her for this purpose.What, I ask, is Martha as an image?What sort of ideals does she represent?In contrast, how do real women’s lives look?How, for that matter, does Martha’s real life look?In the gaps between images, ideals, and real lives, I explain, ideology does its work of obscuring, of specifying acceptable behaviors, and of benefiting the powers that be.The point, I’m quick to say, is not that ideologies are lies, or harmful, though often they are.The point is that culture groups often contradictory ideas together in order to ensure certain beliefs and behaviors.The point of this class, I say, is to teach you to recognize ideology, especially when it operates—as it so often does—within the realm of gender.
From then on, whenever we examine a new image, whether that image is St. Jerome writing on women, Jane Eyre, or pro-suffragist cartoons, I ask them to identify the gap between the image and “real life” and to ask who benefits from such gaps.Students don’t learn feminism from this. But they learn an awful lot about how power works, how the oppressed can participate in their own oppression, how culture can teach one to be complacent about one’s own position.
3.Model
a critically engaged feminism
In the vein of teaching
conflicts, it’s important not to present anything, even feminism, as having
all the final answers.To that end,
I present both the history of feminism and my own attitudes to it as necessarily
conflicted.I’m careful to say that
often the commonalties between, say, first and second wave feminism, outnumber
the differences, but I’m equally careful to present the differences as
serious but conflicting takes on the nature of gender, power, and society.But
perhaps even more important is the presentation of one’s own feminism
as critical and engaged, rather than having been completed already.Does
feminism threaten your religious beliefs?Say
so, and explain how you’ve worked out a solution to that, even if that
solution is partial.Do you find
yourself suspecting that today’s problems are more based on class than
on gender?Explain your suspicions
and doubts and how and why you’re holding the position you currently hold.
2.Problems
I don’t for a moment
pretend these strategies are problem-free, and indeed, this is where I’d
like to ask you in the audience for suggestions about how you might have
approached these difficulties.A
few problems I’ve identified thus far:
a.The quashing of personal experience.You can’t talk about ideology without talking about the ways in which culture pulls wool over everyone’s eyes.And if this is true, personal experience is always suspect.Students have a hard time understanding how women could write texts that oppress women, assuming that resistance to patriarchy is a universal, essential position that can be adopted at will.Obviously, this is not the case, and even women who thought they were resisting patriarchy were implicated in it.This is an important lesson.But it also means that student's own experiences have to be questioned. Much of feminism and the women’s studies approach is based on the belief that women’s experiences have been silenced, and that the personal has too often been dismissed as “merely” personal.Does the emphasis on systemic oppression and ideology repeat this silencing?
b.A certain loss of passion.Teaching a critique that results in bleak visions of power as systemic and oppression as everywhere has its drawbacks.Presenting everything in terms of a debate even you have not resolved makes it hard for students to see that they’ve learned anything.Personal experience, usually framed as narrative, has more intrinsic excitement than an analysis of how the vertical hierarchies of the late Middle Ages imposed a certain understanding of gender that differs from the hierarchies and gender notions of the Renaissance. Students, let’s face it, would rather talk about themselves than “culture”.For that matter, we would often rather talk about ourselves. Moreover, if, as I claim above, this is a method of consciousness-raising, I have to confess that its results aren’t nearly as dramatic as we like to think of c.r. as being—more a thoughtful “hum” than a astounded “aha!” or an anguished “oh, my god.” How can the excitement of the women’s studies class be combined with the approaches I’ve mentioned above?I would like to think that feminism, which has so successfully blended intellectual rigor and passion in the past, would be withstand this challenge as well, and I invite the members of the audience to share their ideas of how—if—we can continue to combine the two.