January 19, 2001,
8:04 p.m. || nervous and nail-biting
It's hard to teach a class (as the graduate
student instructor or teacher's assistant) when the professor gives
little indication of her intentions or agenda. It doesn't help when a
day before the semester starts --no, the night before-- she calls to
say, "I'm working on the syllabus right now." I think of all the work I
put into my syllabi (a process of teasing out threads of inquiry, a
critical mapping of a field and its arguments) and the simply practical
considerations (the copy stores are jam-packed with orders) and I bite
my tongue.
I'm nervous and nail-biting.
Today being the first day of discussion section I offered a brief
outline, improvising a short list of "issues" central to an
introduction to women's studies class: 1) what is gender? 2) why is gender not a discrete political category apart
from
race, class, sexuality, or geopolitics? and 3) what counts
as "natural" or "normal" or "common sense," and why? It's a
simplistic distillation, but I'm not working with a lot. (Do I
even have a set of the readings for next Monday? No, they haven't been decided yet.)
My outline led students in each section to
different questions -- about the nature of the sex/gender distinction,
about the gendered politics of pop culture and its consumption. One or
two students posed wildly complicated questions which I wanted to
address, but couldn't because 1) I didn't want section to be a
fifteen-minute dialogue between myself and the one or two students doing
the asking and 2) there was so much theroetical disentangling involved
in answering their questions that there was no way I could possibly do
much but muddy the waters further. (Especially for the students for
whom the idea that "gender is a social construct" is completely new --
it's not good to lose half the class the first day.)
How do you adequately
respond to, "Well, how do people consume a film like What
Women Want? Do they really think that what's in this film is
what women think about? How much about this do they really believe?" Reams
and reams of books have been written about the politics of audience
reception and consumption, hegemonic culture and its negotiation, is there an
easy capsule formula for explaining this? Oof.
==
In the last week I've had two great conversations with two great
activists about radical pedagogy --one working around anti-racist
organizing in the anti-globalization movement and the other involved in
community development and living wage campaigns. Three cheers for being
inspired.