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Archive for December, 2005

December 22, 2005

Paul, Dierdre Glenn. Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation: Womanist Thought and Perspective. Questions about the Purpose(s) of Colleges and Universities, Vol. 2. Ed. Norm Denzin, Josef Progler, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

December 22nd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, African American

“Through the processes of reflexivity and life history, Paul writes, “I attempt to cohere the concentric spheres of race, gender, and class as they play themselves out in my daily living and multiple roles” (xi). A collection of essays not necessarily meant to be read linearly, Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation documents the author’s own social location as a Black woman in “a racially schizophrenic society, a single mother, a former public school teacher, a teacher educator, and an emerging intellectual” (xi). Just as Paul must live each day through multiple and contradictory roles, so too must the reader of this book encounter linguistic, formal, and narrative multiplicity: an “amalgam of genres and writing styles,” the book is written to promote “disequilibrium” (xii). (Read the article)

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Kumashiro, Kevin. Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002.

December 22nd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Kumashiro’s book works to formulate a pragmatic and theoretically sound antioppressive pedagogy. To this end, the book describes “four primary approaches to antioppressive education suggested by the current field of research” and, going beyond these frameworks, it also explores “insights and changes made possible by some of the theories and stories that are traditionally marginalized in educational research” (9). Thus, Kumashiro analyzes feminist, critical, multicultural, and queer theoretical perspectives and notes that all four perspectives collectively gesture towards “four ways to conceptualize and work against oppression: education for the Other, education about the Other, education that is critical of privileging and Othering, and education that changes students and society” (30). Reading the first three approaches through poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, Kumashiro notes the value of such frameworks and yet advocates a broader conceptualization of “the dynamics of oppression, the processes of teaching and learning, and even the purposes of schooling” (32). (Read the article)

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December 1, 2005

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 17 (1987). 65-81.

December 01st 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, African American

The symbolic order structuring American society—America’s “grammar”—is still dictated by the legacy of slavery, Hortense Spillers writes in this psychoanalytically inflected deconstruction of race and gender in the United States. Beginning with stereotypes of African American women, Spillers analyzes the way African American men are denied access to the patriarchal “name of the Father,” the way African American women are then stigmatized as unlawful leaders of African American society, and the way such a disruption of the patriarchal structure leads not to liberation, but to the disempowerment of all African Americans. (Read the article)

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Moraga, Cherrie. “From a Long Line of Vendidas.” Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End P, 1983. 90-144.

December 01st 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Latina/o American

Cherrie Moraga begins “From a Long Line of Vendidas” with the dedication “para Gloria Anzaldua, in gratitude.” Like Anzaldua’s work, this essay is also a heavily autobiographical account of the way in which gender intersects with race and sexuality. Alternating between journal entries, poetry, and expository writing and combining English with Spanish, Moraga explains how her childhood experiences taught her that as a racial minority and a woman, she was and is doubly marginalized: her brother’s sex, she writes, “was white. Mine, brown” (94). While her brother’s gendered location within the patriarchal system allows him to identify with the white oppressor, Moraga’s gender “fully necessitated my claiming the race of my mother” (94). This identification as a Chicana, however, is complicated. Blending personal narrative with an account of the “historical/mythical” Malintzin Tenepal figure—La Vendida, the native Mexican woman who slept with the Spanish conqueror Cortez and thereby sold out her race—allows Moraga to analyze the cultural prejudice against women and the ways in which women are still coded as “traitors” within Mexican/Chicano culture. (Read the article)

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