Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

their distress over the successful institutionalisation of women’s/gender studiesinto the academy. Detached from activism’s political practices and squeezedinto academy’s abstract theory, as it is described, the institutionalisation offeminism into the academy is said to have shaped the subject field into theform of a proper academic subject. Nancy A. Naples writes thatthe institutionalization of Women’s Studies in the academy constrains the developmentof collective political action that characterized the CR [consciousnessraising] groups of the 1970s. With power differentials between teachers andstudents and among students, and the surveillance of Women’s Studies curriculumby bureaucratic bodies within the academy, feminist faculty often findit difficult to incorporate the ‘commitment to praxis’ in their classrooms. 26These accounts of pedagogy in women’s/gender studies represent the practiceof “academic teaching” as one that builds up hierarchies between the studentsand the teacher, constructing the teacher as an Expert through mechanisms ofauthority. On the other hand, feminist pedagogy is understood as an enterprisewhose goal it is to develop “a critical consciousness”, to empower the studentsand provide them with “the ability to call into question taken-for-granted waysof understanding their social, political, economic and academic life”. 27 Nevertheless,even if described as apocalyptic by Robyn Wiegman, these accounts offeminist pedagogy are really a form of address that equates feminism with thefeminist struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, and which results in a re/productionof divisions between activism, theory and politics. Wiegman writes:Indeed, I want to go so far as to claim […] that any attempt to write movementsubjectivity as the field’s origin and reproductive goal is not simply wrongheaded but counterproductive precisely because it generates as a disciplinaryimperative a certain understanding of the political (and with it the relationbetween theory and activism). 28The idea of a split between academy and activism does indeed rest upon adualist understanding of experience-based work versus theory. Accordingly,when the students resisted using memory work, which they apprehended26Nancy A. Naples, “Negotiating the Politics of Experiential Learning in Women’s Studies: Lessons from theCommunity Action Project”, in Women’s Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman, (Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press, 2002), 387.27Wiegman, 383.28Robyn Wiegman, “Academic Feminist Against Itself”, NWSA Journal 14: 2 (2002), 26.85