Passing / Out in Texas: The Challenges of Progressive Pedagogy in Conservative Climates

I did not like or appreciate the gay and lesbian theater lecture. This lecture was a mouthpiece for liberalism and a sorry attempt to push a homosexual agenda. If Ms. Pryor wanted to be political, she should have taught government.

—Anonymous Student²

I feel as if I am going to keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you're really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don't, you're not really doing no coalescing.

—Bernice Johnson Reagan, "Coalition Politics" 356

Let's face it. We are undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

—Judith Butler, "Global Violence, Sexual Politics" 200

Introduction

During the 2004–2005 academic (and election) year, I taught TD301, Introduction to Theater for Non-Majors, at The University of Texas-Austin.³ Though I had upwards of three hundred and fifty students enrolled in my course each semester—each intent upon fulfilling the University's distribution requirement in the arts—I conducted my class in ways similar to a seminar. I compiled a course reader. I tried to learn names. I facilitated discussions. Though I came to each class prepared with a PowerPoint presentation, often beginning with a minilecture that historically contextualized the day's topic, the majority of the class time was spent doing close readings of "the text" together. The slides contained key quotations that I had pulled from the reading and accompanying questions that I hoped would guide our lecture-cum-discussion. Often, I had student volunteers join me "on stage," acting out exercises that I had devised to clarify theories; other times, selected students acted out scenes from assigned plays so that we could discuss them in closer detail.

Since I structured class largely around open-ended questions and experiential exercises, and I couldn't always anticipate what students' responses would be or their performances would look like, I would characterize my pedagogical style, though in many ways rehearsed, as highly improvisational. Prioritizing response over intent is a practice of feminist pedagogy (see Case), and a potentially exhilarating one—I never could know what to expect, and I was often surprised by my students' smart and incisive comments, the unexpected turns that intellectual conversations would take, and how thoughts and feelings got mapped out and folded back on one another in pleasing ways. Sometimes, however, feminist pedagogy made me vulnerable; prioritizing response over intent would destabilize me in frightening ways, creating tiny disturbances that knocked me temporarily off balance. During our discussion of Anna Deavere Smith's work, for instance, it became clear to me that some students had not previously conceived of identity as performative—a doing, a feeling, a practice—but rather something somehow stable, fixed, coherent, and discrete.

Off the cuff, then, speaking parenthetically and attempting to make connections between theatrical performance and everyday life, the avant garde and the popular, I asked the class to consider the then recent October 2004 presidential debates as a site of performativity: "What identities do you see being constructed and performed by the candidates?" From the back of the classroom, one (white female) student screamed, at the top of her lungs, "Bush rocks!" This comment reverberated in the lecture room for a few seconds, followed by ostensibly affirmative hoots, cheers, laughter, and applause from, as best as I could assess it, about two thirds of the students in the room, or two hundred fifty. They were loud and charged up with what felt like rage or indignation, and they were staring at me: it felt like one of those pedagogical hijack moments in which students reveal themselves to you in an instantaneous flash, as a powerful critical mass. Unsure of how to respond, I asked the student her name (Megan),⁴ and encouraged her to articulate more cogently...