Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

With them I have gained awareness of fallibility, of vulnerability.
From them I have retained the joy of abandonment, of surrendering
without reservations and the grace of accepting oneself.
In this imaginary dialogue/travel with the writing of the Sisters I found
my place, as the heir of a choir of female voices.
Implications for teaching
A feminist pedagogy should stimulate awareness and critical thinking about
the world, and at the same time call for its transformation. Hence, a feminist
pedagogy invites learners to expand their consciousness and be transformed in
the process. One of its educational aims is to promote the empowerment of
women. Several factors concur towards this goal: critical knowledge and the
deconstruction of the paradigms and mechanisms that rule the organisation
of gender relationships in the most diverse fields (including literature); the
production of knowledge about women’s lives in history, placing them at the
centre of critical discourse, as part of a wider political process; thinking from
different theoretical viewpoints; making feminist classrooms the site of transformative
learning experiences by trying new methods and new approaches in
order to establish a collaborative learning environment where students’ ideas
count as contributions to knowledge.
Centred on research about autobiographical texts by seventeenth- century
women, the article may be used in a classroom context in many ways.
Given the diversity of feminist approaches to literary texts, the article
represents a methodological example of a possible perspective: the feminist outlook
on the critical rescuing of literary works that were marginalised because
they collided with hegemonic categories of thought.
This particular approach makes it possible to reflect on a set of other
problems of a literary nature and on issues of sexism that may be expanded
in the classroom: to reflect on the construction processes of literary canons in
history and on the stigmatisation mechanisms that go hand in hand with them;
on the political nature of interpretations; on the marginalisation of certain
literary formats, such as the autobiographical genre; on the hostility towards
and myths about the figure of the woman writer; on the particular conditions
of exercising women’s creativity, and so forth.
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