Literary Identification as Transformative Feminist Pedagogy

Abstract

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois The project of social justice in education, or maybe any education, involves ideological shifts. These shifts include profound changes to the self. Anger, unease, guilt, and grief are all to be expected given that we ask our students, on a daily basis, to rethink normative beliefs. One way that ideological beliefs change is through a process of identification, which occurs on conscious and unconscious levels. As we build our identities through identification, the incorporation of the same and other into ourselves, we also modify ideological makeup. If psychologists are correct, identification is a narcissistic, even violent incorporation. It is also a fundamental way in which we form our identities, and it is part of what is both powerful and treacherous in the reading of literature. Identification and its embeddedness with ideological formation at conscious and unconscious levels also suggests that teaching critical reading as divorced from uncritical reading may not only be undesirable, but probably impossible. Scholars have offered a number of approaches to coping with these issues. Claudia Eppert calls for readings that rely on “an ethical relationship between the reader and the historical moment of suffering” rather than one based upon the relationship between reader and text (100). Drawing on Shoshana Felman’s work, Megan Boler advocates replacing “passive empathy” with “testimonial reading” in which the reader “accepts a commitment to rethink her own assumptions, and to confront the internal obstacles encountered as one’s views are challenged” (164). Faye Halpern shows that critical reading (associated with distance) and uncritical reading (associated with identification) are intertwined with each other (586). She concludes that we need to teach our students the different types of identification and to identify it as such in order to demystify the process of reading and to connect with something students, in fact, are already doing. In a discussion of her black feminist theory class, Ayana K. Weekley finds that by foregrounding the importance of anger and what she calls “battles,” her students do not so readily shut down because of anger or guilt (44). By inviting her students to analyze historical divides and conflicts within the women’s movement, Weekley prepares them to negotiate disagreements and anger as Literary Identification as Transformative Feminist Pedagogy