Teaching Gender

Feminist Pedagogy and Responsibility in Times of Political Crisis

Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Ana Ramos, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Ana Ramos, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Ana M. González Ramos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815347637
• eBook ISBN: 9781351790192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Teaching Gender: Feminist Pedagogy and Responsibility in Times of Political Crisis addresses the neoliberalization of the university, what this means in real terms, and strategic pedagogical responses to teaching within this context across disciplines and region.

Inspired by bell hooks' "transgressive school" and Donna Haraway's "responsibility", this collection promotes a politics of care within the classroom through new forms of organizational practices. It engages with the challenges and possibilities of teaching students about women and gender by examining the multiple pedagogical, theoretical, and political dimensions of feminist learning.

The book revisits how we can reconfigure a feminist politics of responsibility that is able to respond to or engage with contemporary crises. It also conceptualizes crisis and explains how it is transforming contemporary societies and affecting individual vulnerabilities and institutional structures. Finally, it offers practical cases from different European locations, in which crisis and responsibility have served to reformulate contemporary feminist pedagogies, altering curriculums, reframing institutions, and affecting the process of teaching and learning.

1

SHARING VULNERABILITIES

Searching for “unruly edges” in times of the neoliberal academy

Monika Rogowska-Stangret

Neoliberalism is one of the labels used to describe key factors that shape the contemporary world, its relations and institutions, its power structures and modes of subjectification (Foucault 2008 [2004]). Apart from Michel Foucault’s work, which traced the points of emergence of the contemporaneity or the genealogies of a present situation through historical analysis, the humanities reveal many insightful analyses and studies of what neoliberalism stands for. The transformations that constitute the present moment are many, and they are approached from different perspectives that accentuate its various aspects: capitalism, “liquid times” and uncertainty (Bauman 2007), “control societies” (Deleuze 1995 [1990]: 177–82), “risk society” (Beck 1992 [1986]), or the “society of the spectacle” (Debord 2000 [1967]) among others. Those investigations coincide with reflections on the ways universities have transformed in the past two decades along neoliberal lines (Reading 1996, Slaughter and Leslie 1997, Pocklington and Tupper 2002, Cȏté and Allahar 2007, 2011, Nussbaum 2010, Collini 2012). Importantly, the debates concerning the crises of the universities are held from various standpoints, and the recognitions are all but homogeneous; to exemplify the intensity of those discussions let me mention Sara Ahmed’s criticism (2015) of an article by Terry Eagleton published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2015).

Today’s academy, diagnosed as product-oriented, fast, competitive, and as imposing growing demands on individuals, is at the center of attention for the increasing number of scholars approaching it critically. More and more academics engage in discussions concerning life at the academy per se and do not restrict themselves to the narrow area of their expertise. In consequence, a movement devoted to introducing changes in a “slow academy” vein is emerging (Slow Science Manifesto (http://slow-science.org/), Berg and Seeber 2016). If the image of the “ivory tower” as a symbol of scientists’ disengagement with practicality and reality was ever true, it was shattered in the mid-twentieth century by engaged intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. The crises that led to World War 2 and intensified afterward, especially socio-economic inequalities and divisions, proved that one of the key roles of an intellectual is to face reality and to treat theory as a “box of tools” (Deleuze and Foucault 1977: 208) with which one can meet the challenges of the surrounding world and unpack the power relations subtending them. In the neoliberal academy, though, using theory for practical aims reached its own limits and became paradoxical, due to the fact that it lost its critical dimension (Berg and Seeber 2016). What can be heard in the voices criticizing the neoliberal academy today is that science has become all too useful, too handy, too practice-and-product-oriented and as a paradoxical result, too distanced from the material conditions of knowledge production and too unconcerned about the material effects such useful science has on society and especially on subjects living the academic life (this is a point of criticism mentioned by “slow professors” and the slow science movement). Academics are flooded with self-help books that offer ways to succeed in learning how to manage one’s time in a better and more effective manner, but they are not encouraged to problematize how this affects their lives, health, intimacy, relations, or bodies and how it influences education, democracy, and society (Berg and Seeber 2016, chapter 1).

On the one hand, neoliberalism (also at the academy) promotes individualism through advocating for new neoliberal virtues such as productivity, efficiency, and competition: “[t]‌ime management does not take into full account the changes to the university system: rather it focuses on the individual, often in a punitive manner (my habits need to be pushed into shape)” (Berg and Seeber 2016: 25). In response, academics offer solutions that are based on rethinking the potentials of collectivity (Berg and Seeber 2016, chapter 4, Mountz et al. 2015, Cielemecka and Rogowska-Stangret 2015). On the other hand, as Foucault points out, one of the tasks of engaged and critical thinkers is to trace modes of individuation, the ways in which power turns beings into individual subjects and in response “[w]e have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (Foucault 1983: 216). The slow scholarship movement also addresses the problem of how individuals are constituted as individuals, and the advice they offer on how to handle the accelerated academy as an individual (Berg and Seeber 2016, Mountz et al. 2015: 1249–53) is thought to stress the individual’s role in systematic change, but also might be understood as efforts to alter modes of subjectification, because what is at stake is a radical change (this need for change is accentuated in different texts written from “slow” standpoints). What is lacking from the above-mentioned perspectives and what this chapter hopes to address is a more developed approach to the individual, a more advanced elaboration of how one is turned into a subject and what is elided from this process: what does matter in/about an individual and what does not. I aim at looking into how an individual might not only be a factor boosting neoliberalism in the academy, but also at describing approaches to subjectivity that might introduce ways to capture the subject that embrace its potential for resistance to neoliberalism. To achieve that I will look into the main points of criticism of the neoliberal academy with the aim to search for “unruly edges” (Tsing 2012) of individualization, zones where individualization reveals its seams and stitches and uncovers relationality as its conditio sine qua non. “Unruly edges” here are practiced as in Anna Tsing’s essay, where she uses them to scrutinize “the changing practices of being human” (Tsing 2012: 145). To embrace these transformations I would like to offer a return to an ethics of the self as problematized by Michel Foucault (through his elaboration on the care of the self: Foucault 1988 [1984]), bearing in mind the question phrased by Judith Butler: “Under what conditions does self-poiesis become a relational category?” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 67). To answer this question, I will introduce the concept of sharing vulnerabilities, which derives its inspiration from the idea of “shared concerns” as described by Michael Hornblow in his essay entitled A Sahara in the Head – The Problem of Landing (2015) and from a feminist ethics of care.

Living a bodily academic life

In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault recognized a new right established in the nineteenth century: “the right to make live and to let die” that complemented the older right “to take life or let live” (Foucault 2003: 241). This shift demonstrates the change that occurred with respect to power’s focus. The right “to take life or let live” was mainly concentrated on the issue of whether one deserves to live or not, and on what kind of activities may lead to death; otherwise one’s way of life was outside power’s interest, whereas “the right to make live and to let die” voices its concern chiefly about how subjects live and how much they can endure before they are “let die”. Thus, “the right to make live and to let die” opens up the question of how this life is to be lived, and centers the notion of endurance. How much can we endure? How much can we bear? When and under what conditions does life become unbearable, unlivable, intolerable? Therefore, this shift marks the transition from “what” one does to “how” one does it. The change occurs with respect to what is perceived as the main object in power relations analysis, and the question of endurance proves to be one of pivotal importance for those living an academic life.

Testimonies of scholars prove that academics endure a lot just to be able to stay in the realm of academy (see Conesa Carpintero, Chapter 3). Moreover, they both and at the same time actively shape and maintain the conditions that inhibit their well-being, and are passively formed by institutional, organizational, and cultural demands, the tasks they are faced or flooded with, and the time pressures they are subjected to. They are capable of treading a fine line between staying active in the academy in wellness as in illness. To a large extent the state of being unwell is erased from the bigger picture of neoliberal research and higher education institutions, and thus material conditions of knowledge production are wiped out and considered less important than the goals and aims of these institutions. That is why Rosalind Gill stresses the need to “break the silence” and reveal the “hidden injuries of the neoliberal university” (2009: 228–44). Her conversations with colleagues and friends working in the academy uncover a grey sphere of illness (see Conesa Carpintero, Chapter 3) and suffering underlying official academic relations. Gill indicates problems such as: the lack of stability and the uncertainty of work at the academy, unpaid work, the 24/7 ideal of non-stop work, shame accompanying failures (like having one’s text rejected by journal editors/reviewers or not being granted funding), and as a result of all of these, health issues, psychosomatic ailments, depression, and anxiety. Oftentimes it is not even problematized, partly because it is held to be normal. The sticky, stinking bodily dross is consequently wiped out as a necessary side effect.

This takes me back to the powerful keynote lecture presented by Nikki Sullivan at the conference Open Embodiments: Locating Somatechnics in Tucson entitled: Somatechnics of Swallowing (2015) and the potent mechanisms and dynamisms of physiology. The question of how much we can endure is here transformed into: how much can we swallow? The act of swallowing is depicted as a somatechnic that combines the natural gag reflex with the cultural ability to unlearn it: the more we swallow, the less we experience the gag reflex. Therefore, the political response would be to win the gag reflex back and to learn from the bodily impulses and instincts in order to form a visceral politics. On the other hand, Elizabeth Wilson points out that “the gag reflex itself may be attenuated” (Wilson 2004: 79); that is to say, the individual is not only forming the neoliberal system ideologically, but they are also attuning to it organically. Ideally, both swallowing/binging and vomiting would be performed smoothly without even the trace of gag reflex, so how can we win back the gag reflex if it can be erased to such a large extent? One possible answer to this question would be to simultaneously think organically, culturally, and psychologically. This may not seem a revelation, but given the scale of organic adjustments to the neoliberal academy and the bodily transformations individuals are subjected to, it might be a challenge to look into zones of organic attunements – into the literal “how” of “make live”. What kind of organic life is possible? How does one define organically one’s limits or one’s “thresholds of sustainability” (Braidotti 2006: 5), taking into account the fact that psyche, culture, and biology are collaborating to such a large extent? Where are those limits, if the gag reflex is not enough?

To emphasize the organic aspects of life at the academy is also to come back to Foucauldian “make live and let die”: to the questions of how to live, what a liveable life is, and how to endure the growing demands of the academy. Who will sustain “accelerated timeliness” (Mountz et al. 2015: 1237)? Who will fail, being organically incapable of increasing their speed? Not being able to keep up with what’s called “fast science” makes one organically unfit to perform academic work. As Rose stressed in her essay Slowly ~ writing into the Anthropocene: “the culture of audit and surveillance is transforming us into zombies” (Rose 2013: 5). Rose’s zombies are quite literal: they are placed precisely on the border between life and death, they batten on the living to derive their powers from them, and they are doing their job without sleep.

Sleeplessness, constant activity, the impossibility to be passive, inert, or idle are the key characteristics of neoliberal universities that serve as the ground for demands imposed on and by academics. The need for sleep, rest, not to mention the wish to laze around are turned into inadequacies, shameful flaws of character. “Would not less sleep allow more chance for ‘living life to the fullest’?” (Crary 2013: 14). To sleep less and fuel relentless activity means to attune one’s speed to the intensity and pace of neoliberal transformations, and to excite the ever growing appetite and unquenchable desires to achieve more, to make the most of one’s zombie-like life. This attunement happens in multiple dimensions: organic, psychological, cultural, social, and demonstrates how far neoliberalism reaches, how extensive and in-depth it gets. But where to search for an ally if this body of ours (together with our psyche, plans, intents, wishes, dreams) is organically attuning to a neoliberal tempo?

One of the possible solutions might be to care – for oneself and for others – and to notice with care the signs of bodily unsettlement, the traces of imposing on the body the need to harmonize with a neoliberal pace and to abandon the body’s gag reflex: “Self-care becomes warfare. This kind of self-care is not about one’s own happiness. It is about finding ways to exist in a world that is diminishing” (Ahmed 2014). I understand the “diminishing world” as the world that speeds up to the extent that it is no longer possible to grasp differences, and this results in the fact that some do not have to insist that they matter, whereas others “have to insist they matter to matter” (Ahmed 2014). The recognition of the accelerated world and the divisions it tries to hide (including organic differences that are to be understood individually, and as such are normalized or treated as the side effects with which one should come to terms) is the first step to understanding care as preparing the space and time for response-ability/responsibility.

Response-inability and the crises of responsibility

The problem of responsibility in the “accelerated timeliness” of the neoliberal academy has from my perspective at least two major facets. First of all, the question arises: how do the neoliberal academy and fast science contribute to the life of future generations? Second, given the semantic nuances introduced by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad in transforming responsibility into response-ability, the issue of response – its definition and the conditions of its possibility – comes to the fore. Who is able to respond and – in particular – will future generations be able to respond? So in a way these two...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Sharing vulnerabilities: Searching for “unruly edges” in times of the neoliberal academy
• 2 Knowmadic knowledge production in times of crisis
• 3 (No) time for care and responsibility: From neoliberal practices in academia to collective responsibility in times of crisis
• 4 “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself”: Troubling the personal and the political in feminist pedagogy
• 5 Feminist science literacy as a political and pedagogical challenge: Insights from a high school research project
• 6 Screening feminisms: Approaches for teaching sex and gender in film
• 7 Doubt, excitement, pleasure: Feminist practices of teaching and learning in art and education
• 8 Feminist ethics of responsibility and art therapy: Spanish art therapy as a case in point
• 9 (Fostering) princesses that can stand on their own two feet: Using wonder tale narratives to change teenage gendered stereotypes in Portuguese EFL classrooms
• 10 The case of Tumblr: Young people’s mediatised responses to the crisis of learning about gender at school
• 11 On the road: Feminist alliances across Europe
• Index