Resisting the Discourse on Resistance: Theorizing Experiences from an Action Research Project on Feminist Pedagogy in Different Learning Cultures in Sweden

Introduction

Writers on critical, feminist, and anti-oppressive pedagogy criticize the repressive myths of classrooms and other formal educational settings as neutral or unproblematic sites for production of knowledge and identities (Freire; Lather; Kumashiro). This vast theoretical and empirical work has challenged teachers to work through normative notions of power, authority, and knowledge (Friedman; Weiler, “Freire”) and develop teaching strategies aimed at overcoming different forms of resistance in education (Lewis). This latter aspect was intensively discussed during the “poststructuralist turn” in theories of education in general, and especially in the inspiring debates between critical and feminist writers on education in the early 1990s. Feminist researchers in pedagogy and feminist teachers working in women’s studies departments adopted a critical stance against the ideas developed in critical pedagogy on students’ false consciousness when confronted with critical knowledge (e.g., Giroux), instead pleading for an interested, empowering, and transformative version of liberatory teaching (Ellsworth; Lather; Orner).

At the same time, a certain ambivalence on how to actually frame and understand the notions of resistance to feminist knowledge in teaching remains, as many still claim students to be the sole problem when teaching on feminist knowledge. There is a continuing focus on students reinterpreting, accusing, and refusing feminist teachers and teachings on feminism (Markowitz 45), as well as a desire to construct typologies on student resistance, claiming that “students who resist feminism reflect four postures concerning women’s inequality in a patriarchal society: deny, discount, distance, and dismay” (Titus 22).

It is of course true that many feminist scholars and teachers experience a multitude of problems in teaching situations, often related to questions of authority, power, legitimacy, antifeminist discourses in universities and in society at large, and so forth. It is also important to acknowledge that teachers often need to develop different teaching strategies in order to overcome the problems they face, or in order to be able to teach at all, given the experiences they face. But what is at stake here is the framing of these experiences and the consequences they have for teaching and learning in different respects (Ropers-Huilman; Titus). As Berenice Fisher points out, “It is tempting to assume, for example, that the pedagogical difficulty in a given class is one of student ‘resistance’ when the problem might also be defined as one of the teacher’s anger toward a student for not accepting her point of view. . . . Thus, it is important what constitutes the problem, to allow for the possibility that what we consider a social justice teaching issue may be framed and reframed a number of times” (215–16; italics in orig.).

This was indeed one of the crucial insights within the feminist poststructuralist writings on education mentioned above: the urge to shift from student resistance to teachers’ “own resistance to the assumption that ‘their problem’ was not buying into ‘our’ version of reality” (Lather 142).

This in turn called for a deconstructive approach in teaching, focusing on the mutual processes of constituting, disrupting, and transforming authority, power, subjectivity, and knowledge in classrooms, searching out not only a pedagogy of hope (hooks, Teaching Community) or a radical openness when confronting critical knowledge (hooks, Teaching to Transgress), but foremost a pedagogy of “the unknowable”: “My moving about between the positions of privileged speaking subject and Inappropriate/d Other cannot be predicted, prescribed, or understood beforehand by any theoretical or methodological practice. . . . This reformulation of pedagogy and knowledge removes the critical pedagogue from two key discursive positions s/he has constructed for her/himself in the literature—namely, origin of what can be known and origin of what should be done” (Ellsworth 323).

Thus, feminist pedagogy implies performing some kind of feminist teaching practices, while at the same time contesting the very possibility of performing such practices. We need to start out from the assumption that only what cannot be foreseen will enable us not just to overcome resistance to feminist knowledge and teaching but also to make such experiences a vital part of teaching and learning as such.

Notably, the...