Resisting the Discourse on Resistance: Theorizing Experiences from an Action Research Project on Feminist Pedagogy in Different Learning Cultures in Sweden

Abstract

Writers on critical, feminist, and antioppressive pedagogy criticize the repressive myths of classrooms and other formal educational settings as neutral or unproblematic sites for production of knowledge and identities (Freire; Lather; Kumashiro). This vast theoretical and empirical work has challenged teachers to work through normative notions of power, authority, and knowledge (Friedman; Weiler, “Freire”) and develop teaching strategies aimed at overcoming different forms of resistance in education (Lewis). This latter aspect was intensively discussed during the “poststructuralist turn” in theories of education in general, and especially in the inspiring debates between critical and feminist writers on education in the early 1990s. Feminist researchers in pedagogy and feminist teachers working in women’s studies departments adopted a critical stance against the ideas developed in critical pedagogy on students’ false consciousness when confronted with critical knowledge (e.g., Giroux), instead pleading for an interested, empowering, and transformative version of liberatory teaching (Ellsworth; Lather; Orner). At the same time, a certain ambivalence on how to actually frame and understand the notions of resistance to feminist knowledge in teaching remains, as many still claim students to be the sole problem when teaching on feminist knowledge. There is a continuing focus on students reinterpreting, accusing, and refusing feminist teachers and teachings on feminism (Markowitz 45), as well as a desire to construct typologies on student resistance, claiming that “students who resist feminism reflect four postures concerning women’s inequality in a patriarchal society: deny, discount, distance, and dismay” (Titus 22). It is of course true that many feminist scholars and teachers experience a multitude of problems in teaching situations, often related to questions of authority, power, legitimacy, antifeminist discourses in universities and in society at large, and so forth. It is also important to acknowledge that teachers often need to develop different teaching strategies in order to overcome the problems they face, or in order to be able to teach at all, given the experiences they face. But what is at