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Feels Like Teen Spirit: Teaching Cultural Difference through Bodies, Gender, and Affect
- Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 22, 2006
- pp. 94-118
- 10.1353/wgy.2006.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
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Foreign-language pedagogy, cultural theories of affect, and feminism can join forces to help foster cross-cultural understanding among advanced language learners. This fusion is especially useful for commercial popular cultures whose surfaces evince few self-evident cultural distinctions. Theory's investment in affective difference and bodily movement broadens pedagogy's concern for optimizing affective learning factors in the classroom; affect resides in both the form of instruction and in its cultural content. Feminist epistemology operates as a vital moderator in this dialogue, for it alone can grapple with the functionalization of gender difference endemic to both native and foreign popular cultures. (RL)