Come Closer to Feminism: Gratitude as Activist Encounter in Women’s and Gender Studies 101

One does not liberate people by alienating them.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

There are many things that can impede teaching and learning in the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies undergraduate classroom. Most teachers can probably rattle them off in five seconds. A well-known challenge is teaching students about “bad news”: rape on college campuses; shooting deaths of unarmed black teenagers; aggressive social control of women’s lives and bodies through legislation and court rulings; stigmatization of immigrants; escalating violence against trans women; and the entrenched racial and class system that has led to the extraordinary rise in mass incarceration of people of color and women. To make matters worse, the introductory course, which is typically offered as a general education requirement at many institutions, attracts students with “open hostility to the subject matter” (National Women’s Studies Association 10). For many teachers of introductory women’s and gender studies, we are in the position of introducing bad news to an already hostile audience.

To deal directly with this dilemma, I have been rereading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and taking inspiration from bell hooks’s Feminism is for Everybody, but a profound influence on my teaching recently is the voice of an American teenager, Julie Zeilinger, the author of A Little F’d Up: Why Feminism Is Not a Dirty Word. Zeilinger addresses young women’s negative emotions about feminism in a clear, humorous, and relaxed way. She analyzes foundational feminist issues and women’s history, and she covers contemporary media and body image, bullying, human trafficking, hook-up culture, cyber-stalking, racism, and the challenges of global feminism. Some have correctly pointed out that Zeilinger does not go into sufficient depth about these topics, nor does she thoroughly explore the implications of her own background. She refers to herself as a “privileged white girl” from Pepper Pike, Ohio, and she mentions that her racial and economic privilege is “definitely something that’s shaping this book” (83). Others complain that A Little F’d Up lacks historical and theoretical nuance, making it too simplistic for university and college classrooms. And some find Zelinger’s use of teen vernacular distracting and, at times, disrespectful. While these misgivings must be taken seriously, the author’s book—which was written while she was a high school student—is not only a well-informed feminist primer for contemporary youth, but also inspirational. It’s not a comprehensive text pitched to seasoned activists, theoretically astute feminist scholars, or more advanced students with women’s and gender studies theory and activism under their belts. Its audience includes the many students out there who harbor hostility toward feminism. Like bell hooks before her, Zeilinger encourages people to “come closer to feminism” (hooks vii–x).

Remarkably, she does this by exuding a sense of gratitude for what feminism has done for her personally. When Zeilinger tackles difficult issues, she also talks about why she appreciates feminism and what it has done for the world. This is what I found most powerful about Zeilinger’s writing: her obvious admiration for feminist activists and scholars. Taking the work of this American teenager seriously has inspired me to devise a “gratitude project” in the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course I teach. Gratitude and appreciation for feminist activists who have worked to create social transformation is now an explicit focus of my course.

I have typically approached the dilemma of student resistance to WGST with carefully constructed syllabi designed to encourage cognitive/intellectual awareness of the astonishing achievements of WGST. But I’ve found that many hostile students don’t care how smart WGST scholars and feminists are. Rarely do students “think” their way out of their anxiety and cynicism about feminism. A feminist gratitude project offers a new approach. Motivated in part by my familiarity with Martin E. P. Seligman’s positive psychology exercises—in particular “The Gratitude Visit” and the “What-Went-Well” exercises—I have adapted Seligman’s approach as a way to work with students’ negative emotions...