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The Pleasures of Teaching Race

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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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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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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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

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 12, 2005

The Pleasures of Teaching Race Bibliography

September 12th 2005 Posted to The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Baumeister, R. F. “Masochism as Escape from Self.” Journal of Sex Research 25 (1988): 28-59. (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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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 13, 2005

Barrish, Phillip. “The Secret Joys of Antiracist Pedagogy: Huckleberry Finn in the Classroom.” American Imago 59.2 (2002): 117-39.

August 13th 2005 Posted to The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Whiteness Studies

In this essay, Barrish analyzes the pleasures inherent in being a liberal white antiracist professor. These educators face an “unavoidable paradox” when they attempt to address racism: while the purported aim of such an antiracist pedagogy is to move beyond the influence of a racist past, citing this past leads white educators into a performative reiteration of the past and of racism itself (117). For his primary example, Barrish deconstructs the rhetoric underlying prohibitions of the word “n-word,” showing that the prohibitions themselves tend to repeat the word again and again, placing the white antiracist uttering the word in a double bind or, in more psychoanalytic terms, an aporia. Barrish turns to the Lacanian psychoanalytic term “jouissance” to explain the horrifying pleasure-pain of being caught in this double bind, but notes that because jouissance demands the dissolution of the individual’s psyche, it is “quickly repackaged” into a “more readily consumable masochistic scene of fantasized white male suffering” (122). (Read the article)

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August 3, 2005

Weis, Lois and Michelle Fine, eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Beyond Silenced Voices is a compilation of articles focusing on institutionalized silencing in public schools. Divided into two parts, Weis and Fine’s collection begins with a series of studies that analyze the ways marginalized voices are systematically silenced according to race, gender, and class affiliations. These pieces are each concerned with the ways certain voices are silenced by both implicit and explicit institutional structures imbedded in the public school system, as well as the way in which these silences are sustained and naturalized by the institution. In the second part of the book, writers attempt to listen to these institutionally silenced voices by incorporating individual testimonials into the articles. It is only by hearing and centering these “once marginalized” voices, Fine and Weis argue in their Introduction, that we can move “‘beyond silenced voices’” and “understand and interrupt the perversions and pleasures of power, privilege, and marginalization in public schooling” (2). (Read the article)

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