Academic attainment and feminism?

I think, for me, part of the difficulty I've had with my students was that most of them felt two things very strongly:

1. We know all of this stuff! We know women are equal (?!), women had it bad in the past, and Rape is Wrong. We don't need to be told!

2. We are studying something we paid for; we do not have time to speculate on irrelevancies (and we can recognize what's irrelevant and what's not).

Both of those are perfectly sensible, natural ways to think and I'm not slating them because I felt the same when I did my degree - impatient with things when I didn't see how they related to my subject.

So, my job is partly to show how things are related, and why what may seem 'irrelevant' is actually important. This will make my students better at their lit.crit. - it's not a side project.

With my students and the text I mentioned about rape, there is a huge amount of modern criticism exploring what that text is doing, what strategies it is using to push you, the reader, into a particular position. I don't know why, but I think lots of us as undergraduates fall back on the idea that the past is the past, and if you are uncomfortable with a text, that's the wrong reaction. Critics writing on Chaucer, though, will give you ways to articulate how this text is deliberately using rape as a means to make its readers feel disturbed and uncomfortable; it's deliberately presenting a story about rape and male dominance in order to make you take issue with those ideas. Whether you think Chaucer further reinforces male dominance and male structures of telling stories (in which women are sidelined), or whether you want to argue he might have been arguing against misogyny in his culture, you have to face up to the strategies of the text.

Next time I teach that text, I might see if i can give the students something by, maybe, Dworkin on rape, just so I don't get the same response from one of them that I got this time. But I might run up against the problems 1 and 2 above - that they feel they 'know' already that rape is wrong (not that that is the basic lesson!), and they're not sure morality is relevant. But the lit. crit. is good, powerful stuff that really analyses how texts work. It's not, imo, 'soft' feminism, it's a really good tool that I think teaches women how to say 'this text makes me uncomfortable, and I can tell you why that's so'. It means you have an answer when people say 'oh, it's just [an advert, a story], you shouldn't be so emotional'.

I would like to teach more feminist theory, but I just wanted to explain how my teaching goes and what I do manage to get them doing. I'm just starting out with my teaching but I don't think because we don't teach theory, we don't tackle questions, if that makes sense?

Is de Sade taught much?

Dh had to do some work for university (tenuous link with this- stage lighting module, chose the play Marat / Sade). It was fantastic to work on but we ahd to do masses of research as I had only very briefly encountered him and Dh not at all.

Much of what de Sade wrote about was physically impossible so not exactly teaching men HOWEVER he lived in an asylum with his twelve year old 'lover' which is enough to convince pretty much anyone of his contemptability I would imagine. He was sent to the BAstille for several reasons- not least becuase of teh high llinks his in laws had and their shame at his adultery. interstingly he stepped in to save their lives later on (or at least play a part) despite having been sent to an asylum by them which I find intriguing from a psych point of view, given the horrors of the time.

Not my field though of course; studied psych / philosophy and religion / autism and worked with MH patients years ago so ahve snapshots of insight but nothing fomalised.

Just want to say that Dittany's views on what feminist theory is and where Judith Butler fits in are not universally shared. I think Butler is a feminist, even if she is not a feminist of the same faction as Mackinnon, and the only thing more depressing than patriarchy itself is watching feminists attack one another like this. See Cordelia Fine's excellent book on the fallacies of neuroscience for more on all these topics and on the way a male-dominated environment promotes the disavowal of all that is 'feminine'; there HAVE been real feminists since the heyday of Dworkin, who - and this may well be unfair - carries no academic credibility, I fear, and NOT because she is a feminist but because her research is sloppy (especially on witchcraft/fairytales, but also on pornography).

Hmm on de Sade :
"He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting bizarre sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, ... "　link

Makes perfect sense. Why teach women's liberation when you can teach men how to get off on hurting women instead.

OMG I just skim read and saw "Kate Millet" and "unsophisticated" in the same sentence

OMFG kate millet kick started the feminist movement. All other important feminists pay lip service to her: Dworkin, Jeffreys, Greer, Daly.

Hand on heart, reading Kate Millet (on dittany's recommendation) made me feel for the first time in my life that I was reading the work of a true intellectual, a genius. That last chapter on Genet, the climax, fucking hell, the brain on that woman.Nothing else I've ever read before or since has ever matched the brilliance in every single line of Sexual Politics

I can't really see why de Sade is taught at all, other than if it is taught from a feminist perspective.

dittany - that would be a good course! But I'm just a lowly temp teacher (most people don't get to write their own course syllabuses (if wishing made it so ...). I teach medieval lit.

I had a student last term who really disturbed me - the student wrote an essay on a story, which is presented as an Arthurian romance, in which a man rapes a woman, is punished and learns to 'truly' understand what women want. My student didn't register that this was a totally, horribly unacceptable way to present a lesson learned. I really want to teach something that would bring home to students like him how awful that is - I think he struggled because it was fictionalized and 'long ago', so he almost couldn't connect to it in a human way.

It doesn't have to be at all, it'd just be good. The problem I have is that one of the ways that I'd thought to teach 'theory' (not just feminist) is to weave it into the more recent lit crit - when I've done this before students responded on a more sophisticated level because they could see how to relate the theory to the lit crit and could see there really were dialogues going on between different academic disciplines. Otherwise, I've been in classes when the theory takes over, and you find that instead of discussing the primary text, you end up talking for an hour about racism or sexism or whatever the theory is about. And students who're not politics/sociology undergrads are often not the subtlest readers of straight theory, so it can be quite boring and unhelpful.

I would like to teach some of the older stuff too, don't get me wrong. I'm just thinking how to do it - my area is said to be the place people who hate theory go, but lots of academics write on women and would identify as feminists, so I think that could change.

I fundamentally disagree with a lack of direct radical feminist reading material with privileging the patriarchy. Particularly not when the context is a female-dominated enironment that privilege's women's voices and women's thoughts.

No, my students don't get given Dworkin to read. At first year level, in fact, they don't get given any theory 'in the raw'. And when I say I recommend, I don't just point my finger towards the library, I sit them down in a tutorial and we discuss, we find the library code together and we book a follow-up tutorial for them to discuss it. There's more than one way to get it in their brain.

Academia could, and should, do better. I have explained the resonings behind the omission of Dworkin and Millett. I have also pointed out that we discuss the violent oppression of women by men even if we don't do it in the company of Dworkin. I have also noted the potential inclusion of Daly, and potential inclusions of Millett and Dworkin if I ever get the chance to develop my own curriculum. I know my job, I know that I cram in as much feminism as possible, I know that it infuses everything that I do. My students roll their eyes when I start banging the table again.

That might be failing, and I might have failed. But I'll just have to keep on failing, I guess. This has been a very enlightening discussion though, thank-you to all and especially dittany.

dittany, how would you cover radical feminism in a lit degree? I would like to, so give me something to go on?

What is there you'd consider radical/exciting that's been written in the last 10 years? That'd be great.

There were two students, Dittany, one identified strongly with de Sade, the other said she was found descriptions of what was done to the victims erotic but that she identified with the women (she was as perplexed by this as anyone else). The fantasy was in the response, not the text. Or, if you like, the sadist and the masochist were in the room.

No, no confusion, although maybe they went off to read him in an unmediated form rather than through Dworkin. Or maybe they started to think more about their own responses and how these might have been conditioned by a patriarchal culture.