233d Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive

December 22, 2005

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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November 21, 2005

Swisher, Karen Gayton. “Why Indian People Should Be the Ones to Write about Indian Education,” American Indian Quarterly. 20.1 (1996), 83-90.

November 21st 2005 Posted to Native American

In this article Swisher argues that, while many attempts have been made to research the unique needs of Indian students in schools, “much research is still presented from an outsider’s perspective” (83). Swisher claims that non-Indian researchers cannot accurately represent life on the reservations, the struggle for recognition and the importance of preserving the language and culture of indigenous tribes. “If non-Indian educators have been involved in Indian education because they believe in Indian people and want them to be empowered,” she writes, “they must now demonstrate that belief by stepping aside” (85). (Read the article)

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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

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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2073

November 3, 2005

Giroux, Henry A. “Insurgent Multiculturalism and the Promise of Pedagogy,” Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994, 325-343.

November 03rd 2005 Posted to Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, The Academy

In this article Giroux argues that both conservative and liberal forms of multiculturalism do not go far enough to expose white racism and promote social justice. Whether in the classroom, the corporation or in the political arena, multicultural discourse tends to essentialize minority cultures and ignore underlying power structures. Giroux proposes a form of “insurgent multiculturalism” that would “strip white supremacy of its legitimacy and authority” (326). According to Giroux, schools and institutions of higher learning should use this “insurgent” version of multiculturalism as a “tool for critical understanding and the pluralizing of differences; it must also be used as an ethical and political referent which allows teachers and students to understand how power works in the interest of dominant social relations, and how such relations can be challenged and transformed” (337). (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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23b9

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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Latina/o American Bibliography

October 11th 2005 Posted to Latina/o American

Carter, Thomas P. Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1970.

Chavez, Linda. Out of the Barrio : Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. New York: Basic Books, 1991. (Read the article)

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