‘My body speaks to them’: instructor reflections on the complexities of power and social embodiments

Abstract

The dynamics of instructor embodiments and their relation to notions of power are explored in this paper. Informed by feminist poststructural theory, the author argues that, in classrooms where the focus of study is on conceptions of identity such as gender and race, the body of the instructor becomes an explicit pedagogical example. Through interviews with eight instructors who teach these ‘critical identity courses’, issues of ‘bodies in power’ and the instructor as both powerful and powerless are explored. The author concludes that thinking of power relations in the university classroom as productive – rather than as a binary of powerful versus powerless – points to the temporality and fluidity of the classroom space and the bodies that are found within it.