21d2 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race, Gender and Sexuality

Race, Gender and Sexuality

November 17, 2005

Williams, Patricia J. “On Being the Object of Property (a gift of intelligent rage).” The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 216-236.

November 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, African American, Court & Policy Issues

Utilizing a combination of feminist personal narrative and legal discourse, Williams analyzes how contract law and the legal institution exercise a “deadening power” by creating in the individual “a passive relationship to the document: it is the contract that governs, that ‘does’ everything, that absorbs all responsibility and deflects all other recourse.” (224) She explores in particular how this quality of contract negatively affects those who have been institutionally (and thus legally) formulated as inferior: people of color and women. (Read the article)

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November 14, 2005

Suleri, Sara. “Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 116-125.

November 14th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, The Academy
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In the context of the culture wars of the mid-1990s, Suleri calls for a reassessment of the terms under which we study gender and race, particularly as it is manifested in the discourse of postcolonial feminism. While Suleri is highly critical and ultimately dismissive of the popular contention that the academy is ceding itself solely to the issues of marginalized groups in the name of “political correctness,” she argues that it is necessary for academics to critique the very discourses under attack from the media. (Read the article)

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October 23, 2005

Case, Sue-Ellen. “The Student and the Strap: Authority and Seduction in the Class(room).” Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA, 1995. 38-46.

October 23rd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

An analysis of the growing commodification of subcultural sexual practices (such as
lesbian S/M) and identities (like “the dildoed dyke” (38)) leads Case to an examination of these so-called transgressive masquerades within the pre-existing power relations of the classroom. While such performative reworkings of the culturally gendered dominant/submissive binary stems from a 1980’s “politics of oppression” which allowed “dykes and, for example, women of color to form coalitions and consonances among themselves,” she goes on to argue along with other critics that the utter subsumption of parodic forms by capitalism undercuts their revolutionary potential. (Read the article)

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October 11, 2005

Sleeter, Christine E. and Carl A. Grant. “A Rationale for Integrating Race, Gender, and Social Class.” Class, Race and Gender in American Education. Ed. Lois Weis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988, 144-157.

October 11th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

In this article Sleeter and Grant voice a concern that since the sixties intellectuals in the social sciences have subsumed all forms of oppression under a class analysis. Racism and sexism, they argue, deserve separate treatment if real social change is to occur: “There is a need for the continued development of theory and research that emphasizes social justice and emancipation. Such theory must, however, see race, gender, and class as equally important and as enduring forms of oppression that are interrelated but not reducible to one form” (145). (Read the article)

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October 5, 2005

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. 134-53.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

At times mobilizing her essay into a description of how to structure “a course on International Feminism,” Spivak uses French Feminism against itself, deconstructing Western Feminism’s typical, benevolent objectification of the Third World Woman or “other” (147). In order to “learn enough about Third World women,” Spivak writes, the “First World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman” (136). Naturalization of gender is transformed into privilege by this First World feminism, and this in turn disguises the construction and oppression of women of various locations and situations. As a version of First World feminism, French feminism’s particular strength—an emphasis on female sexual pleasure above and beyond all else—is also its shortcoming. Ignoring race and class, this variety of First World feminism exemplified by Kristeva’s About Chinese Women self-centeredly returns to the question of sexuality and sexual freedom, and by doing so is “symptomatic of a colonialist benevolence” (138). (Read the article)

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Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Whiteness Studies

Arguing that “race shapes white women’s lives” as well as the lives of women of color, Frankenberg asks dominant (white) academic feminism to recognize its relation to both race and racism (1). Analyzing whiteness in material and discursive terms, Frankenberg suggests that whiteness is socially constructed and, while it is frequently racialized as racism, it can in fact become a site of resistance to racism. White Women, Race Matters centers around 30 interviews Frankenberg conducted with white women between 1984 and 1986 in Northern California. Her interviewees were diverse in “age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation,” and by reading these interviews critically against themselves, one another, and her own questions, Frankenberg hopes to convey the way in which “race, racial dominance, and whiteness” are “complex, lived experiences” (23, 22). By insisting that racism is a “‘white issue’” as well as an issue that results from the ways in which racial discourses and material relations are reproduced, Frankenberg “attempts […] subversion” by way of an “investigation of self rather than of other(s)” (18). This study calls for its own self investigation and in doing so, models a self-critical model of study that has implicit—rather than explicit—pedagogical ramifications. (Read the article)

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September 19, 2005

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, The Academy

In this indispensable and highly influential book, bell hooks (the writing persona of Gloria Watson) writes essays in the varying forms of feminist personal narratives and/or dialogues, based on her experience as a black woman (both student and teacher) in an educational system dominated by a white male ethos. The essays all strive to break down that structure of domination. “Multilayered, then, these essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the act of freedom.” (11)

Hooks’ work is informed by both feminist pedagogies and the Marxist critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (see his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, abstracted on this site). In the introduction hooks discusses where these pedagogies took her and also the point at which she believes they failed. They lent her the tools to eschew the submission to authority and rote memorization occurring in what Freire calls the “banking system of education” and to practice in their place critical thinking and a democratic classroom engagement with the object of knowledge. But hooks suggests that even these critical systems fail to acknowledge the radical value of the pleasure of learning, particularly in higher education. (Read the article)

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Tsolidis, Georgina. Schooling, Diaspora and Gender: Being Feminist and Being Different. Feminist Educational Thinking Ser. Philadelphia: Open UP, 2001.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Tsolidis argues that “schooling, particularly secondary schooling, is a significant site for processes of identification,” and that gender is a particularly significant part of these processes (10). Arguing as a feminist but from a diasporic position as an ethnic minority in Australia, Tsolidis endorses a feminism that does not “assume a unitary voice”: “My overall intention is to argue that it is possible and valuable to be both feminist and different” (3, 2). She writes as an antiracist feminist, and turns to education as a significant site for “potential means of changing both society and the lives of individuals” (4). Because schooling provides such an important context for adolescent identity formation, Tsolidis’ focus on secondary education has implications for identity—and society—at large. (Read the article)

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Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Expanding the Categories of Race and Sexuality in Lesbian and Gay Studies.” Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA, 1995. 124-35.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Academy

Yarbro-Bejarano writes about the continuing marginalization of lesbian and gay issues within American ethnic studies, and notes that the underlying problem is the way in which categorical areas of study “focus on one issue, whether it be gender, race, class, or sexuality, as if it existed separately from the others” (127). Instead of employing a strategy such as “inclusion,” Yarbro-Bejarano suggests “a relational theory of difference that examines identity formation in the dynamic interpenetration of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation” (128). (Read the article)

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Cummings, Katherine. “Principled Pleasures: Obsessional Pedagogies or (Ac)counting from Irving Babbitt to Allan Bloom.” Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change. Ed. Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991. 90-111.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Differentiating between obsessional and hysteric neuroses as defined by Freud and as gendered by Irigaray, Cummings argues that an obsessional (masculine) economy dominates “pop” humanity-defense pedagogy books from Irving Babbitt’s 1908 Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities to works such as E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. (Read the article)

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