Feminist Pedagogy Meets Feminist Therapy: Teaching Feminist Therapy in Women's Studies

Abstract

The affective realm—including sorrow, pain, ecstasy, vulnerability, joy, and rage—is a central component of feminist teaching and learning (Breeze; Durfee and Rosenberg; hooks; Kishimoto and Mwangi). Feminist classrooms are spaces where strong feelings are raised, paradigms shift, and ruptures are created. Coming to feminist consciousness may involve grief, anger, and sadness for students. Speaking about the process of politicization that some students experience as part of their education, bell hooks reminds readers that pain is often a part of this process. Twenty plus years of the journal Feminist Teacher as well as the publication of numerous books and articles have provided feminist educators with excellent pedagogical tools to use in women’s studies classrooms—from strategies on how to build shared commitments to learning environments (Durham; hooks) to ways of theorizing how we might work across differences (Lorde et al.; Fellows and Razack; McIntyre) to specific teaching tools that might help us to engage our students (Miller; Carillo; Turpin). And yet there still remains a paucity of writing about approaches or resources that professors might use to help our students deal with the past and present traumas that arise in women’s studies classrooms. In this article, we argue that teaching our students about the possibilities of feminist therapy is a useful addition to any women’s studies syllabus. Feminist therapy situates individual pain against a larger context of systemic inequality. We are specifically talking about a feminist therapy that understands individual and collective discrimination as trauma that both results from and is intensified by interlocking systems of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism. That is, feminist therapists understand that individuals and collective injuries must be situated within specific familial, social, and historical contexts. We argue that feminist therapy can offer an excellent place for students to turn to deal with some of the grief, anger, and upset that may be caused by examining difficult issues in class or that may arise following a shift in student’s thinking and politicization that strains their current intimate relationships with partners, friends, or family. We came to this project after a visit that Shaindl Diamond made to Shoshana