Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

fascination with the strong commonalities between the different memories –even though this was the most heterogeneous group of them all, consideredin terms of age, ethnicity, sex and sexuality. Curiously, we noted that no onehad mentioned anything about knowledge in their memories of entering theuniversity for the first time, but that all the memories were centred on inclusion/exclusion in a social context. The two groups who wrote about “Cooking forsomeone else” found that the topic brought about strong emotions, both inthe form of spontaneous emotional attachment to the memory itself, and inthe form of a curious resistance to the stereotypically gendered actions that thememories/analysis exposed (after all, many of the participants had a deep investmentin gender equality). The discussion in one of those groups – the groupwhere one student started to cry – came to focus on how to handle issues ofethics in teaching/research. The participators in all the groups, were fascinated,nonetheless, by the possibility to treat the memories – also their own memories– as objects, and not as personal testimonies of an experience to which anyone‘owned’ the ‘right’ interpretation. Even though some of the students also foundthis painful, it gave them an insight into the vulnerability of research subjectswhen collecting and analysing narratives from interviews, for example. Whenthe three small groups reassembled into one large group after a short break, allthe groups commented upon the process. Some were fascinated by the exercisebecause they had learnt a lot, theoretically, methodologically and ethically,while others were critical and found the method too experimental for this kindof group. This was because of the lack of trust between members of the group,because the workshop was mandatory, and because of the expectations attachedto an academic course in gender studies. Afterwards, some students reportedthat they had found the closing session very problematic and that they hadproblems with listening to the conversation, much less contributing to it.At the end of the day, the mix of emotions, confusion, anger, surprise andcuriosity in the group was thought-provoking – especially considering that thetheoretical point of departure of the method (that we work ourselves into socialstructures) really is everyday-knowledge for most of the students (that is, Masterstudents in gender studies). This is particularly curious when thinking of howmuch emotions and personal narratives ‘regular’ lectures about gender usuallyraise. On such occasions, students are often very keen to share their own narrativesof gendered experiences, to support or challenge the teacher’s argument. 4242Mulinari, 43.90