How the “neutral” university makes critical feminist pedagogy impossible: intersectional analysis from marginalized faculty on three campuses

Abstract

While critical pedagogy emphasizes the marginalized status of the learner, feminist pedagogy challenges the presumption of a one-dimensional power dynamic in the classroom by illuminating the intersecting axes of power along which everyone in a learning community, including the pedagog, can simultaneously enjoy privileges and experience marginalization. Yet there has been little empirical intersectional research on how the university as an institution interferes with critical and feminist teaching. Extending Torres’s intersectional theorization of critical pedagogy and building on sociological research on workplace inequality, we investigate the role of the neoliberal university in facilitating/obstructing feminist critical teaching. We conducted ethnography on three campuses across two countries, the United States and Peru. While we expected that our unconventional teaching methods combined with our foreignness, womanhood, and queerness would invite resistance from students, we found that the messages sent by the race- and gender-neutral neoliberal university were at the root of the illegibility of our teaching and our intellectual existence. We argue that the neoliberal university as it exists is antithetical to critical pedagogy in general, and feminist teaching in particular, attesting to the urgency of returning critical pedagogy to its roots in political organizing beyond formal education.