Decolonizing the Home at Home in the Pandemic: Articulating Women’s Experience

Abstract

Feminism bears the promise of liberation of and equality for women. Reading and teaching feminist texts, within the academia and in activist spaces, has provided the opportunity to explore what it means to become and be a woman. This article explores the experience of teaching a course on women’s writing at the undergraduate level during the COVID-19 pandemic. Normally, a course on feminist writings is an occasion for self-reflection, thereby providing an opportunity to establish a dialogue between the domestic and the public. Such dialogues took place in secure institutional spaces such as classrooms or conference halls, without the intrusion of the domestic. However, as the teacher–student interaction shifted to an online mode during the pandemic, all the participants in this dialogue, including the instructor and the students, found themselves in domestic spaces, with family members listening. The article chronicles the anxieties of a woman instructor, as she teaches feminist texts from home to learners who are sitting behind computer screen in their homes and the possible impact of feminist ideas on the domestic spaces of all participants.