Stories that Matter Now: Feminist Classics & Feminist Desire in the Contemporary Classroom

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Stories that Matter Now: Feminist Classics & Feminist Desire in the Contemporary Classroom Jennifer C. Nash (bio) and Samantha Pinto (bio) As scholars who live with feminist texts, the work of teaching is often a project of return. We carry our well-worn copies of books and articles, revisit underlinings that remind us of earlier preoccupations and enduring questions, make new notations in the margins of a text, feel a sense of amazement when a text “works” (or doesn’t work) in the classroom. Jordy Rosenberg (2014) describes the experience of living with a text—for them, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble—as the realization of the text itself as an event: Many of us have read Gender Trouble—or sections of it—countless times. We return to it. Maybe this is the fidelity of which Badiou speaks: something happens, an “event,” and it cracks open a seam in the reproduction of the status quo. The labor of remaining truthful to this seam, and to forcing open the seam to the point of political transformation might become your life’s work. And it is, perhaps, related to the endless reading of a text—a text that is an event. But the event-ness of a text unfolds alongside other events, and “Teaching the Feminist ‘Classics’ Now” takes as a point of departure a desire to archive contemporary pedagogical practices, dilemmas, and challenges as a way of understanding the ecology of academic feminism. While we are invested in a temporality we call “now,” we remain purposefully ambiguous about what constitutes the now. “Now” might describe #MeToo, the Trump era, the United States’ forever wars, and the institutionalization of women’s studies in the US university. More than anything, we imagine “now” to index a series of questions: What must I teach now? What would I never teach now? How do I teach texts that have elisions and gaps that are “now” often the source of Left condemnation? What do we want from feminist texts, and what do we want our students to want from those texts? These critical queries necessarily point to our felt life as feminist scholars who come to the projects of reading and teaching with a sense that this labor is political and/or potentially transformative. These queries [End Page ix] also suggest that for academic feminism, the project of pedagogy is inextricably bound up with affect. Each article in this special issue sits with a “classic”—an author, an article, a monograph—and grapples with the pleasures, perils, possibilities, and politics of teaching that work “now.” The feminist classics of now are named not to keep them static but in recognition that feminist theory performs different work in different times, and what becomes the object du jour may not suit or mobilize feminist work in uncertain times to come. Indeed, part of the critical impulse of this special issue is to return to particular questions about the feminist classics as objects: What do our attachments or detachments to certain classics tell us about the field as it is currently constructed and/or as we, as scholars, currently construct it? These questions necessarily require authors to grapple with “good” and “bad” feminist objects—at least objects that are constructed as such in a particular era. We notice in the essays herein a construction of our pedagogy through affects of love, care, and respect, but also in defensiveness, proprietary urges, and certainty in attempting to work through and even “fix” the status of feminist classics as objects in and of the feminist classroom. Though these “ugly feelings” are fleeting wherever they appear, we want to call attention to these patterns of asserting narratives of lack/absence and the teacher/syllabus/ classic object as the cure so that we always remain lovingly wary of our own attachments to pieces of feminist theory in our pasts, presents, and futures. At its best, this issue and feminist theory remain not guarded but generous—capacious and self-aware that the feminist classroom, and hence the feminist classics, are always open to interpretation and hence always involve risk, failure, and letting go. It is out of this sense of the complex and ever-changing enterprise...