Making an Impact?: Feminist Pedagogy and Rape Culture on University Campuses

Abstract

Shortly before St Patrick's Day 2012, an incident occurred in Guelph that made me question the effectiveness, value, and impact of our teaching about sexual violence. It was yet another example of the endemic problem of rape culture being perpetuated on university campuses, a problem that is acute across the country from St Mary's and UBC, where frosh week pro-rape chants were defended as being traditional to the University of Ottawa, where the student union president Anne-Marie Roy was the subject of sexually assaultive email exchange among her colleagues. Indeed, the recent allegations against Jian Ghomeshi, who gained a Women's Studies minor at York University in the early 1990s, all too clearly raise the spectre that liberatory, feminist pedagogy encourages ventriloquism as often as transformation. Pedagogy on the representation of sexual violence is inherently a tightrope walk. On the one hand, one has to approach the topic without reinforcing the patriarchal systems that make rape possible, such as fear, and, on the other hand, one has to avoid eliding the lived experience of a large portion of our student population. Fear doesn't allow students to bear witness to the fact that the way that we see rape working in a given text is largely influenced by our own culture's expectations and beliefs regarding this particular gender relation, and, at the same time, ignoring the anxieties that attend the topic risks trivializing the experience of students who have been assaulted. I teach Shakespeare and my research focus is the representation of the rapist on the Renaissance London stage, so I inevitably end up talking in my classes about the myriad ways in which expectations of sexual entitlement within a patriarchal culture work to dehumanize the individual, constructing gender in a toxic manner that is predicated upon violence. It is not just that Jonson, Middleton, and Shakespeare are dead voices, speaking a dead language, about a dead culture, but that the things they said can be used both to reinforce rape culture and to dismantle it today. That is, studying these authors and the representations of sexual violence within their works gives students the opportunity to see how sexism in that literature can be used to perpetuate a system where masculine sexual violence is sometimes overlooked, sometimes condoned, but always present. These texts can be read as both resistive of and complicit in hegemonic patriarchy, and if we want to upset the patriarchy we have to recognize how in our own critical readings we have the power to either problematize or reinforce the type of predatory masculinity we find on the Renaissance stage. These classes are always the most emotionally draining for everyone involved. I cite my own position as one who benefits from, yet works to subvert, patriarchal privilege as a way to encourage students to interrogate their own relationship to patriarchal violence. The recognition of privilege, trauma, and the mechanics of gender-based violence can be transformative for certain students, who--at least within the confines of the academic setting--come to acknowledge themselves as participants in the systematic dehumanization of others and themselves. However, in order to create a classroom that is genuinely liberatory, we must speak to those who do not recognize that the system of gender relations to which they subscribe perpetuates a culture of violence and hatred. Behind the gowns of the academy, students, faculty, and administration can try to hide their sexist biases, yet when rape culture erupts in the real world as it were, we really have to question what kind of effect--if any--such liberatory pedagogy has. Is it possible that the same student who insists in an essay that the rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus was horrific would then go out and sing a song about raping and mutilating a woman for sheer erotic pleasure? Well, maybe. The story goes like this . …