Literary Identification as Transformative Feminist Pedagogy

The project of social justice in education, or maybe any education, involves ideological shifts. These shifts include profound changes to the self. Anger, unease, guilt, and grief are all to be expected given that we ask our students, on a daily basis, to rethink normative beliefs. One way that ideological beliefs change is through a process of identification, which occurs on conscious and unconscious levels. As we build our identities through identification, the incorporation of the same and other into ourselves, we also modify ideological makeup. If psychologists are correct, identification is a narcissistic, even violent incorporation. It is also a fundamental way in which we form our identities, and it is part of what is both powerful and treacherous in the reading of literature. Identification and its embeddedness with ideological formation at conscious and unconscious levels also suggests that teaching critical reading as divorced from uncritical reading may not only be undesirable, but probably impossible.

Scholars have offered a number of approaches to coping with these issues. Claudia Eppert calls for readings that rely on “an ethical relationship between the reader and the historical moment of suffering” rather than one based upon the relationship between reader and text (100). Drawing on Shoshana Felman’s work, Megan Boler advocates replacing “passive empathy” with “testimonial reading” in which the reader “accepts a commitment to rethink her own assumptions, and to confront the internal obstacles encountered as one’s views are challenged” (164). Faye Halpern shows that critical reading (associated with distance) and uncritical reading (associated with identification) are intertwined with each other (586). She concludes that we need to teach our students the different types of identification and to identify it as such in order to demystify the process of reading and to connect with something students, in fact, are already doing. In a discussion of her black feminist theory class, Ayana K. Weekley finds that by foregrounding the importance of anger and what she calls “battles,” her students do not so readily shut down because of anger or guilt (44). By inviting her students to analyze historical divides and conflicts within the women’s movement, Weekley prepares them to negotiate disagreements and anger as normative parts of working toward social justice.

The university where I teach has a largely white, male student population with a flagship environmental studies program. The program is attempting to incorporate environmental justice into its curriculum, and the university has begun to work on diversifying its student population and faculty. However, with its mascot of a mountain man and promotional materials that emphasize “wilderness as classroom,” the school often employs masculinist rhetorics of the reinvention of self through wilderness, ones that Mei Mei Evans has shown constructs nature in ways that “serve to promote the interests of a select few to the exclusion of all ‘Others’” (182). The university at large and the environmental studies program encourage students to develop a “sense of place”: incoming students take a first-year experience course based upon the idea of local place, and environmental studies students write their own Leopoldian Almanac as a senior capstone project.

Every other year or so, I teach a general education environmental justice literature course that is on the recommended list for environmental studies students. The majority of students are environmental studies majors or minors, or English majors fulfilling a diversity requirement. Most identify themselves as both environ-mentalists and adventurers. They often do environmentalist work on campus and the community and enjoy backcountry skiing, backpacking, white-water kayaking, and rock and ice climbing. They tend to see themselves as defenders of the environment and champions of the rights of Earth. My course is part of the larger dialogue within environmental studies to redefine environmental studies and environmentalism as inextricably tied to issues of race, class, and gender. It is also involved in the university’s project to diversify its curriculum.

Each time I have taught the course, I have encountered tremendous resistance, anger, frustration, and fear. Each time, mid-semester, I have also considered never teaching the course again. Yet I keep returning to it, and, over the long haul...