The Gender Studies Classroom: Its Promise and Discontents

Abstract

This paper explores a unique set of existential and ideological difficulties associated with teaching ‘gender’ in a women’s studies department while drawing on the pedagogic experiences of academics and colleagues teaching gender/feminism in more mainstream departments like sociology. It looks at the gender studies classroom as a transformative space where entrenched systems of beliefs, institutional arrangements and gendered relationships can be contested and rendered unstable. Simultaneously, it remains a space fraught with conflicts, confrontations and vulnerabilities for students and teachers alike. While ‘gender’ as a relational category marks a shift from ‘woman’ as a biological/essentialist/reductionist concept, I argue that the transition from women’s studies to gender studies has not been adequately grappled with. Woman/gender is caught between contending and contingent forces—the legacy of the autonomous women’s movement with its activist thrust, the NGOised/empowerment discourse with a top-down, instrumentalised approach to ‘gender’, and the heterogeneous aspirations and politics of gender transgressive and socially marginalised student constituencies. The gender studies teacher must navigate these complexities which on occasion confront and trouble her/their own gendered sense of self and precarities.