Feminist Pedagogy: Building Community Accountability

As antiviolence activists and university professors teaching and learning about violence prevention and feminist movements, we are inspired by the collaborative visioning of Critical Resistance and Incite! Women of Color Against Violence with regard to ending violence without reproducing it: "We seek to build movements that not only end violence, but that create a society based on radical freedom, mutual accountability, and passionate reciprocity. In this society, safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples" (226). We have committed to taking this vision into our women's and gender studies classrooms, where we strive to create feminist community that practices building reciprocal and accountable relationships across the power lines produced by interlocking systems of racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and heteronormativity. We seek to develop and enhance our skills and imagination for collective responses to everyday oppression and violence that do not rely on policing or punishment. Our goal is to build our capacity to support "the survival and care of all peoples" that is not "premised on violence or the threat of violence." In this essay, we share stories from our classrooms where using these teaching and learning skills demonstrates the possibilities and difficulties inherent in practicing collective responses to everyday oppression and violence. We are drawing from the work of small and large feminist groups across the country, inspired by the visionary work of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, that strive to shift antiviolence efforts from relying on police and punishment systems toward community-based engagement for accountability and transformative justice (Incite; Rojas, Bierria, and Kim).

This shift toward transformative justice is important in women's and gender studies, as it remains a significant point of entry for students into feminist engagement and activism. Feminist projects, including antiviolence projects, on college campuses often use a default logic that relies on punishment and shaming in response to everyday oppression. This includes increased reporting, stronger investigatory mechanisms, and a carceral framework of punishment as the methods to address interpersonal and structural oppression and violence. Many see those strategies as the only way of gaining accountability from the university as well as from those who engage in harassment, abuse, and violence. But these processes often reinscribe the current oppressive police and punishment systems that do not provide real validation and support for those harmed nor accountability from those enacting violence for its impact. They reproduce the racist, classist, xenophobic, and heteronormative systems of a carceral and retributive justice system and mostly seem to protect white middle- and upper-class heterosexual men from accountability for their harassment, abuse, and violence. Universities on the whole refuse to acknowledge the social and political roots of violence that require much more than interventions into individual incidents. This default logic also does not help students build and deepen feminist community because it does not offer ways for students to engage one another in the face of their own participation in oppression and harm.

This default logic is connected to the ways in which most people in the United States, including many of the students in our classrooms, understand sexual, racial, and gender harassment, abuse, and violence as individual private problems, rooted in personal and familial gender dynamics and perpetrated by psychopaths who should be punished, banished, and incarcerated. As leaders of the Seattle-based group Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) aptly explain, "Sexual violence is often treated as a hyperdelicate issue that can only be addressed by trained professionals such as law enforcement or medical staff. Survivors are considered 'damaged,' pathologized beyond repair. Aggressors are perceived as 'animals,' unable to be redeemed or transformed. These extreme attitudes alienate everyday community members … from participating in the critical process of supporting survivors and holding aggressors accountable for abusive behavior" (250).

Given the high levels of sexual, racial, and gender violence experienced by students on our campuses (Bannister et al.), in our neighborhoods, and in our families, like CARA we recognize that all of us are impacted by and implicated within...