Review Essay: Pondering Pedagogical Paradoxes

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Review Essay Pondering Pedagogical Paradoxes L eland G. Sp encer

Bradley, Harriet. Gender. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Print. Murphy, Michael J., and Elizabeth N. Ribarsky, eds. Activities for Teaching Gender and Sexuality in the University Classroom. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2013. Print. Orr, Catherine M., Ann Braithwaite, and Diane Lichtenstein, eds. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Stoll, Laurie Cooper. Race and Gender in the Classroom: Teachers, Privilege, and Enduring Social Inequalities. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013. Print. At the 2008 meeting of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender, I attended a panel focused on confronting feminist paradoxes. Panel convener Erika Kirby facilitated a conversation about difficult moments feminists face that cause us to reflect on our values and how we apply them in our everyday lives. In small groups, we participants talked about

reconciling feminism with heterosexual relationships, religious faith, views about human sexuality, wardrobe choices, and many other topics where we seem to navigate tensions in our feminist principles and practices. As I read the four books that make up this review essay, that panel resonated with me again. As feminist teachers (and scholars, activists, and thinkers), we face paradoxes regularly. The four books reviewed here, to varying degrees, may help us do that (or may complicate our work in productive ways). Laurie Cooper Stoll’s Race and Gender in the Classroom: Teachers, Privilege, and Enduring Social Inequalities takes up and leaves us with questions about how primary school teachers can or should address issues related to race and gender in their classrooms. In an argument I found persuasive and compelling, though not at all surprising, Stoll contends that teachers rely on a social equality maxim, an idea rooted in the myth of meritocracy, that assumes all students who work hard can succeed, regardless of their social locations. In an ostensibly postracial and postgendered America, people interpret information about race and gender

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through a lens of social equality, even when material reality suggests that race and gender continue to inform and contribute to a matrix of domination that produces inequality for women and people of color. The whole book seems to adopt and struggle with a paradox frame: Many people view education as a solution to social inequality, but how can education solve problems of inequality when education itself, as a social institution, remains biased? Through a method of institutional ethnography that involved interviewing and observing eighteen teachers in a Chicago suburb, Stoll found that teachers recognize racism but simultaneously downplay the role of race in the construction and maintenance of social inequality. Teachers wanted to make their classrooms colorblind. Like some of the students in the classes I teach, the educators in Stoll’s study wanted to stop talking about race. When they addressed race explicitly in their classrooms, the teachers tended to celebrate multiculturalism by highlighting the achievements of individual people of color. Such lessons never critiqued systemic and structural racism and as a rule tended to frame racism as a historical rather than current problem. Teachers’ approaches to gender differed from their views on race. Stoll found that teachers more often endorsed essentialist and deterministic understandings of sex in ways they never would for race. For instance, the teachers Stoll interviewed would never say black students have natural intellectual deficiency compared to their white counterparts; teachers regularly assumed, however, that the differences they noticed between the boys and girls in their classes resulted from innate sex differences. Further, teachers will220

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ingly and intentionally segregated class activities by gender. By contrast, when academic tracking meant that students ended up segregated by race, teachers recognized the racial segregation as problematic. Throughout Stoll’s discussion of teachers’ approaches to race and gender, she seems frustrated that when teachers address racism or sexism, they often do so from a frame of liberal individualism. Never, Stoll laments, do these public school teachers try to explain and critique patriarchy or the structural forces of white supremacy in their second and third grade classrooms. Without clearly suggesting how one might introduce the concept of patriarchy to eight-year-olds, Stoll eventually acknowledges toward the end of the book that teachers face a number of constraints. Even the most well-meaning teachers have to answer to principals and superintendents who in turn find themselves held accountable to state and federal guidelines and regulations that often materialize as standardized tests. In her closing chapter, Stoll finally poses the question whose answer she has assumed throughout the book: should teachers be “on the hook” for addressing systemic sexism and racism in their primary school classrooms? Yes, Stoll concludes, but they also need a corresponding increase of input in framing educational policy. Praiseworthy especially for its rich use of qualitative interview and ethnographic data, Race and Gender in the Classroom provides an often frustrating, occasionally revelatory, and consistently thoughtful look inside eighteen Chicago classrooms. Like many academics, Stoll excels at critique, regularly pointing out the shortcomings and ideological problems with teachers’ approaches to race and gender r e vie w essay

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in their classrooms. How teachers might improve without gaining the access to policymaking power that Stoll understands as ideal remains unclear. Given the constraints teachers have, how might they better challenge systems of power and domination? Continuing with the theme of paradox, I next turn to Harriet Bradley’s book simply titled Gender, published in the Key Concepts Series by Polity Press. The definitive paradox at the heart of this book is how it ever managed to get published in the first place (and, even more inexplicably, reprinted in a second edition). Evidently written for introductory level undergraduate students in sociology or gender studies programs in the United Kingdom, the book sets out to discuss gender theoretically in three chapters (one introductory, one about modern views on gender, and one on postmodern and poststructural approaches to gender) and then consider gender in the applied social contexts of production (gender in the workplace), reproduction (gender in the home and family, including patterns of domestic labor), and consumption (gender and patterns of leisure and spending). Between each chapter, the book includes vignettes about Bradley’s life, hypothetical examples, or applied research contexts. In some ways, Gender does a minimally capable job at what it hopes to accomplish. It introduces basic theories and debates in the study of gender in a generally accessible way. However, I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. What it does well is not unique—several undergraduate textbooks introduce gender in just as accessible a way, and in most cases with better examples and more up-to-date research (Julia T. Wood’s Gendered Lives sticks out as

my preferred example, but any number of books would be better choices). Obscure examples, dated references, and old research likely strike many readers as forgivable offenses, but Gender’s most fatal flaws move it beyond the scope of redemption. I found Bradley’s factual errors stunningly breathtaking. In the preface to the book, Bradley refers to Anita Hill as “a white woman bringing a case against a black man” (x). Frankly, I had trouble continuing to read the book when the author misstated such an important fact about such a famous case. Bradley later claims that Greece is a “Catholic countr[y]” (140), though most Greeks are Orthodox and Greece has more Muslims than Catholics. Beyond information Bradley gets patently wrong, I also felt disturbed by the number of contemporary conventions of writing about gender and sexuality Bradley violated nonreflexively. She blithely refers to “hermaphrodites,” seemingly unaware of the term “intersex.” She consistently uses the word “homosexuality” without acknowledging the term’s clinical connotations and apparently unmoved by the rest of the field’s consistent use of “lesbian and gay sexualities” or “queer sexualities.” To make matters worse, she calls “homosexuality” and bisexuality “alternative modes of sexuality” (137) and seems to buy into all the assumptions of heteronormativity except when she explicitly engages in critiquing heteronormativity as such. For example, in the vignette between the first two chapters, Bradley speculates that gender-segregated schools provide better learning environments for young women because women students need not worry about feeling distracted by their sexual attraction to male classmates. Ostensibly at least—assuming her logic holds—Bradley overlooks just how many

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distractions such a school must present for a lesbian adolescent. Readers especially invested in poststructural theory and sex-positive feminisms may find Bradley’s treatments of these topics less than fair. Her response to Judith Butler’s work in particular seems oversimplified and rushed, though the book’s intended audience may appreciate that about Bradley’s synopsis. Finally, as I find myself often alarmed at how little my American students know about current events in the United States, I regret to report that Bradley’s frequent references to British politics (including legislation and government leaders), current events, and even statistics (such as wage differences reported in pounds) make her book especially inappropriate for students in the United States. In short, do not buy this book. Do not assign it in your classes. Do not check it out from the library or request it to your school’s library. Avoid it—unless you, too, want to puzzle over the paradox of its publication. Editors Michael J. Murphy and Elizabeth N. Ribarsky open their excellent collection Activities for Teaching Gender and Sexuality in the University Classroom with a paradoxical observation. Many of us who teach about gender and sexuality in university classrooms have little to no formal training in teaching itself. Their book aims to remedy that deficiency by offering thirtyone instructor-tested, goal-driven, and theoretically informed class activities for (as the title suggests) teaching gender and sexuality in university classrooms. Each chapter includes suggestions about the type, level, and size of class for which the activity would be appropriate; learning goals; estimated time needed; required materials; a theoretical rationale; step-by222

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step instructions for preparing and facilitating the activity; discussion questions; typical results and student responses to the activity; limitations and cautionary advice; alternative uses and ways to adapt the activity for other topics, contexts, or assignments; references and additional reading; and, when appropriate, handouts to copy or adapt for classroom use. Instructors in any humanities or social science field will find several useful activities in this collection. Among the disciplines, communication seems to be overrepresented, though not in any way to the book’s detriment. Several of the activities excited and inspired me as I read. Some of my favorites included Elizabeth Currans’s suggestion to ask students to debate same-sex marriage not in the traditional for-or-against fashion, but as a conversation between liberal “gay and lesbian rights” activists and queer and intersectional critiques of marriage; Sarah Stone Watt’s activity that asks students to critique the representation of women on the Forbes 100 list as a way of making sense of cultural messages about powerful women; and Elizabeth N. Ribarsky’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” story that illustrates social exchange theory by asking students to make decisions about relationships as the instructor narrates. I plan to add this activity to my Interpersonal Communication course next semester! For the purpose of writing this review essay, I read this book from beginning to end. I doubt many readers will (or should) do that. This book ought to be perused, particularly by those who discover that an extant activity in their classes begins to feel stale or suddenly flops in a new context. Anyone teaching a brand-new class or revising an established course should flip through this book, reading titles and r e vie w essay

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scanning topics to see what might work. The “alternative uses” section of each chapter expands the possibilities for the activities so that the book will also help instructors teaching online courses or looking for new graded assignments or course projects. This helpful collection has only minor drawbacks. I wish each chapter began with a summary of the activity because I sometimes had to read half the chapter and flip ahead to the example handout before I knew what exactly students would do with a particular activity. I also found the rationale sections, on the whole, to draw too much from secondary sources like gender and sexuality textbooks where I would prefer primary journal article sources. Even with those minor concerns, this book inspired me and reminded me what I love about teaching gender and sexuality. I look forward to having it on my shelf as a handy reference for years to come. A key paradox that haunts research and teaching in women’s and gender studies (WGS) programs centers on the tension between challenging social institutions and organizational structures while also working, living, and moving within and among those same structures. As a result, in the midst of challenging hegemony, certain concepts and ideas even within WGS become hegemonic themselves. Editors Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite, and Diane Lichtenstein and the contributors to Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies take on the difficult task of inviting WGS faculty members and students (especially graduate students) to reconsider some of our most foundational assumptions, particularly in light of those assumptions’ liabilities. For instance, Layli Maparyan asks in the first content chapter of the volume,

must we adopt (and expect our students to adopt) a feminist worldview in order to study women qua women? And how might our feminist perspective alienate some of our students and colleagues? Who benefits from the metaphor of “community” (and related motherdaughter metaphors) so often invoked to describe WGS programs? Or from WGS’s increasing identity as a discipline (even while it disavows such an identity)? Or from the related institutionalization of the field within universities and colleges? Martha McCaughey, Ann Braithwaite, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe address these questions in their chapters. At the risk of oversimplifying their more nuanced arguments, these three chapters have in common the theme that WGS’s increasing visibility and power in institutions and as a discipline benefit white women far more than women of color. As such, WGS might become a community on campus where white women feel comfortable talking about their research and interacting with their colleagues, but that feeling of community and the institutional benefits of recognition as a discipline (especially access to administrative power) offer significantly more to white women than to women of color. My favorite chapter in the volume, Karlyn Crowley’s “Secularity,” contends that we cannot ignore religion and spirituality because they contribute to and inform people’s understandings of gender. WGS scholars and teachers must stop, Crowley suggests, assuming that religion always holds conservative or anti-women views. Even worse, Crowley contends, WGS scholars often reduce religion to culture when they discuss or write about women of color: “I observe white feminists allowing for discussions of religion from women of

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color, discussions that go uninterrogated, because religion is translated as culturally important and necessary rather than accepted on its own terms as belief” (255). Both approaches, “immediate dismissal and unwitting transmutation,” Crowley argues, “display an unconscious discomfort with the spiritual and religious; neither is honest” (255). This collection deserves our attention and our admiration for many reasons: it is challenging, thought provoking, and thorough. It features a diverse and brilliant cast of contributors. Without exception, it takes intersectionality seriously (Vivian May’s chapter on intersectionality argues that we often talk about intersectionality but seldom do it well; I hope she feels as impressed as I do with this volume’s attempt). Never did I feel that a chapter only represented what a white woman would say about a particular term. The book’s ambition deserves credit, even though I suspect that same ambition burdens the book as a liability. As compelling as I found Maparyan’s chapter about feminism, I do not come away from the book persuaded not to teach from a feminist perspective or to abandon my feminism at the classroom door in an effort to make students more comfortable. I do not mean to suggest that I have precisely described Maparyan’s goal here, but the study of women qua women has always been political and, I believe, is best when it remains so unapologetically. As convinced as I am by Astrid Henry’s critique of the “Waves” metaphor, I still cannot imagine teaching about feminist history without invoking terms like “first wave” and “second wave” (even if I might now include Henry’s article to invite reflection about the metaphor’s limitations). The editors are correct to call these terms 224

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hegemonic, and such hegemony appears throughout the book as other authors use the terms critiqued in different chapters. While the “History” chapter works nicely as a companion to the “Waves” chapter, and the “Community,” “Discipline,” and “Institutionalization” chapters cohere comfortably as I already discussed, the tension between Maparyan’s “Feminism” and the rest of the book dwelt with me the whole time I read. Several chapters assume WGS is always already feminist. Such a tension underscores the importance of the book and makes the book especially appropriate to discuss in a faculty reading circle or graduate seminar in WGS. Indeed, as I read I often wished I were with other WGS professors rather than sitting in my living room on summer break. These arguments demand discussion and debate. As interested as I am in the many issues at the heart of the book’s call to rethink our basic assumptions, I should acknowledge that the book speaks to a relatively limited audience. Certain chapters may be of use in advanced undergraduate courses, but this book really addresses faculty members and graduate students training in WGS (whether as a primary field or as certificate students taking WGS courses as a cognate to other disciplines). The book’s organization into sections: “Foundational Assumptions,” “Ubiquitous Descriptions,” “Epistemologies Rethought,” “Silences and Disavowals,” and “Establishment Challenges” makes it ideal for assigning in graduate seminars. The editors include questions for discussion at the end of each section. The brief concluding chapter poses more questions that put chapters in conversation with one another across sections. Graduate faculty might also find the editors’ confession in r e vie w essay

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the introduction that they left out some terms (such as “masculinity”) as an opportunity for a class assignment. Students could write genealogies and arguments about terms like masculinity, patriarchy, gender, performativity, and others not included here. These four books respectively address primary school, undergraduate, and graduate teachers and teaching contexts, and across the spectrum, each (except Bradley) presents feminist paradoxes worthy of our time and attention. Embracing rather

than resolving the tensions inherent in Stoll, Murphy and Ribarsky, and Ott and colleagues’ work promises to make all of us better feminist teachers. works c ited Kirby, Erika. “Narrating Our Lives and Our Worlds: Stories of Feminist Paradox.” Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender. Nashville, Tenn. October 2008. Conference Panel. Wood, Julia. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. Boston: Wadsworth, 2009. Print.

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