Abstract
This article explores tensions between critical feminist pedagogy and the neoliberal corporate university, asking how engaging the body and redistributing student agency highlights larger questions of power that haunt the academy as a whole. Including specific embodied exercises used in WGS classrooms, this essay argues that as students and professors engage within an increasingly corporate university system, embodied activities that incorporate the body as a site of learning and critical analysis can access situated knowledges while projects that de-center power and responsibility are viewed with skepticism. I attribute this discrepancy to the neoliberal structure in which we teach and learn, arguing that we need to value and make visible the labor that goes into critical pedagogy.
Highlights
Despite teaching topics in introductory Women‘s and Gender Studies (WGS) classes such as transgender theory, gender violence, and menstrual politics, I am surprised by the postfeminist position students often take about housework
Feminist pedagogical praxis emerged from a tradition of progressive, emancipatory education called critical pedagogy which ―interrogate[s] the pedagogical interrelationships between culture, economics, ideology, and power‖ and ―nurtures the development of critical consciousness‖ (Darder et al 23) in order to effect social change
Some students interpret Collaborative Participation (CP) as intending to reduce my workload: ―I thought the fact that the students had jobs to help the professor out andto give us participation and a say in the class‘ very unprofessional on her part and made me feel like we were in elementary school.‖ Another found CP effective ―as a theoretical concept [in which] everybody was supposed to have a say in how things are done,‖ yet he articulated a struggle with authority in ways that suggest that careful framing is necessary when implementing the CP model of participation: ―assigning class jobs is only giving the illusion of empowerment
Summary
Despite teaching topics in introductory Women‘s and Gender Studies (WGS) classes such as transgender theory, gender violence, and menstrual politics, I am surprised by the postfeminist position students often take about housework. The student crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned back in his seat, legs spread wide, defensively denying vulnerability Even if his black working-class background would funnel him, like his father, into the often invisible, denigrated, and feminized labor of cleaning up after other people, he could claim male privilege within his home. The first are a series of embodied pedagogical exercises based on methods described in Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal‘s 1992 Games for Actors and Non-Actors These ―gamesercices‖ known as Theatre of the Oppressed [48] involve movement, roleplaying, and making living ―statues.‖1 The second are collaborative methods I use to open up new avenues for class participation, including some portions of classroom management such as creating study guides, defining vocabulary terms, and designing surveys. All direct quotations from students are taken from in-class writings, institution-administered end-of-term evaluations, or personal communication with students
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