2565 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race, Gender and Sexuality

Race, Gender and Sexuality

September 14, 2005

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Basic Books, 2000.

September 14th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Initially published in 1905, this text radicalized Western understandings of sexuality, neurosis, and civilization. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is divided into “The Sexual Aberrations,” “Infantile Sexuality,” and “The Transformations of Puberty,” and by linking his essays together in this single text, Freud implicitly draws a connection—uncomfortable to some and ignored by many to this day—between “aberrations” and more “normal” sexual development. As Nancy Chodorow writes in her “Foreword,” Freud begins with “what ‘we’ have traditionally believed” and subsequently “marshals every argument and all the evidence in his power to puncture the conventional assumptions” (vii). While the book as a whole is, as a monumental contribution to twentieth century thought, worth detailed consideration, this abstract will only address the first essay on “The Sexual Aberrations.” Insofar as it attends to the psychic construction of masochism and sadism, Freud’s first essay on the theory of sexuality is valuable background for many of the works abstracted in The Pleasures of Teaching Race. Freud does not attend to race in this book, but his theorization about the connection between sadism and masochism has led to numerous analyses of race and its relation to psychic structures of pleasure and pain. (Read the article)

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September 13, 2005

Bryson, Mary and Suzanne de Castell. “Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect.” Canadian Journal of Education 18.2 (1993): 285-305.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

“What difference does it make–being queer in the classroom? What would that mean, anyway–being queer?” ask Bryson and de Castell in their article, “Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect” (3). Because the tension between post-structuralist concepts of subjectivity and essentialist understandings of identity is, according to Bryson and de Castell, at least theoretically resolvable, the authors turn their analysis instead to the complex and contested ground of “pedagogical practice” (1). Describing the particular context of an undergraduate lesbian studies course co-taught in 1991, the writers describe the development of a “‘queer pedagogy’—a teaching against-the-grain” (4). (Read the article)

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Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

In this important contribution to contemporary theory, Sandoval offers a “method of oppositional consciousness” that stands in contrast to the “neocolonizing mode of globalization” infecting the postmodern world (2). Arguing with Jameson’s bleak dismissal of any resistance to neocolonization, Sandoval points to U.S. third world feminism as an example of “oppositional political activity and consciousness in the postmodern world” (43). Rather than focusing on pedagogy in particular, Methodology of the Oppressed suggests a theoretical frame for wide-scale social change. (Read the article)

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September 5, 2005

Wing, Adrien Katherine. Critical Race Theory: Critical Race Feminism. Course Syllabus, Spring 2005.

September 05th 2005 Posted to Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race, Gender and Sexuality

As author of over 70 publications and editor of both Critical Race Feminism: A Reader and Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader, Adrien Katherine Wing has been instrumental to the development of Crtical Race Theory along feminist lines. Her Spring 2005 course syllabus for Critical Race Theory: Critical Race Feminism–located online through her University of Iowa homepage–is a practical resource with suggestions for course design and further reading. (Read the article)

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September 3, 2005

LaCapra, Dominick, Ed. The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American

The Bounds of Race provides a subtle analysis of the variable role of racial ideologies and traces the interplay between hegemonic constraints and the strategies of resistance to them. The contributing authors take on questions of language, genre, and politics with reference to African American, Anglo-American, African, South African, Francophone North African, British and Afro-Hispanic texts. Individual chapters discuss writings from an array of genres including homily, autobiography, the novel, children’s literature, and political and scientific discourse. Taken together, the essays persuasively argue that the existing canon must be expanded, that the protocols of interpretation must be transformed to make a prominent place for such issues as race, and that the problem of interpretation cannot be posed in the absence of theoretically informed modes of historical investigation.

2008

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August 30, 2005

Freire, Paolo and Donaldo Macedo. “A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race.” Harvard Educational Review. 65.3 (1995) 377-402.

August 30th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

In this dialogue Freire and Macedo discuss several critiques of Freire’s work, elaborating upon the nature of Freire’s dialogical method and upon its implications for and alliance with critiques of race, class and gender oppression. The article is most valuable for Freire’s elaboration upon the concept of dialogics and for its overt address to the issue of race. (Read the article)

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August 29, 2005

Hernandez, Daisy. “Playing with Race.” Hot and Bothered: Sex, Race, Gender. ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action 7.4 (Winter 2004-05).

August 29th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Hernandez reports on an activity in the BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) community called “race play.” In race play, participants engage in racist scenarios and employ racist language in order to become aroused. The appearance of race play at BDSM workshops and conferences has prompted a controversy, with opponents both in and outside of the BDSM community arguing that such “play” hits too close to home, because “Racism was institutionalized as social, economic and legal practices, in part, through rape and the white domination of black sexuality.” (Read the article)

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Dean, Tim. “The Germs of Empires: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Trauma, and the Historiography of AIDS.” The Psychoanalysis of Race. Ed. Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 305-32.

August 29th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Dean reads Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness through its cultural status as a novella whose subject is colonialism. Taking as his point of departure critic Helen Vendler’s comment that a reading of colonialism in Heart of Darkness is “‘anachronistic and patronizing’” (qtd. in Dean 305), Dean addresses the novel’s role in “current controversies over the literary canon, multicultural education, affirmative action, and political correctness” by focusing on “the popular racist idea that Africa is the origin of AIDS” (305). (Read the article)

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August 28, 2005

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.

August 28th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Addressing topics as diverse and as reciprocally relevant as theory, pedagogy, feminism, literature, music, and the media, Writing Diaspora argues for a rigorous reappraisal of cultural studies. Chow is wary of the explosion of area studies and cultural studies in the Western Academy, noting that “cross-cultural” study, with its attention to difference, can in fact reinscribe colonial “othering” and risks remaining “trapped within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (7). (Read the article)

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August 18, 2005

Lee, Rachel C., and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds. Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2003.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and the Internet, Asian American 1a37

A book of collected essays, Asian America.Net seeks to address the question of how cybertechnologies complicate the tenuous space occupied by Asian Americans on issues of identity, transnationalism, and gender/sexual politics. If it is a truism, write Lee and Wong, that there was no such concept as “Asian American” prior to ethnic consciousness movement of the 1960s – the entire label being a construct – then the additional layer of technological virtuality only intensifies contestation of what it means to be Asian American. (Read the article)

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