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

father more than her. It is the love and caring work of many women that has
made it possible for men to uphold their ‘autonomy’. For me it took years to
recognise that it is neither possible nor attractive to be autonomous in the way
my father was. Writing this chapter I have become aware of the interdependency
between them and the love they gave me, each in their way. The inequality
between them and the influence this has had on my life has, however, made me
realise that democracy between the sexes is a necessary condition of democracy
in the public sphere. The same realisation is also stressed by Elena Pulcini in
Modernity, Love and Hidden Inequality.
Within feminist pedagogy there is a strong tradition of empowering
students and stimulating their awareness and critical thinking. To make this
happen it is, as I hope to have demonstrated, necessary to see the inter dependency
of the personal and the political. Otherwise teaching will reproduce the
subject/object dichotomy, in the sense that the teacher is the subject, telling the
students, the objects, what they have to learn. This again would leave students
with no other choice but to reproduce this pattern when they leave college
and become professionals. In this way the other remains the other, the power
scheme is reproduced, and nothing has changed! I have recently re-read bel
hooks and her description of how her joy of being a student paradoxically
changed with racial integration. 19 Knowledge was no longer about freedom; it
was about information. It has no relation to how one lived and behaved, and it
was no longer connected to the anti-racist struggle. “Bussed to white schools,
we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was
expected of us. Too much eagerness could easily be seen as a threat to white
authority.” 20
My understanding of teaching is intimately linked to my conception
of knowledge and epistemology and thus to the conception of what it is to
be a human being and what it takes to be a responsible subject and citizen.
To be a human being is, as I have illustrated above by tracing connections
between areas normally treated as separate, to be in a continuous process of
becoming, allowing both that one’s ethos is embodied and socially constructed
and that there is a remainder providing space for agency. In this understanding
knowledge is more than theories in a book, empirical data collected, or
even experiences; knowledge is to me an ongoing co-creational and situational
19
bel hooks, Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practise of Freedom. (New York: Routledge, 1994)
20
Ibid., 3
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