Performing Critical Generosity in the Feminist Classroom

But I feel keenly that critical generosity is a necessary gesture in how we see the relationship of performance [. . .] to the project of world building, as it allows us to think specifically beyond the present of reception into the near future of potential activism and engagement. Generous criticism, then, also considers how we imagine the afterlife of performance.

—Jill Dolan, “Critical Generosity”

Since one of the major projects of feminist pedagogy is to interrogate and intervene in limiting social roles, careful attention to the range of available performances for feminist teachers is vital. The concept of critical generosity offers a both/andness, an at-once-ness to feminist teachers. Because critical generosity collapses, combines, and complicates the polarized roles available to feminist teachers, it expands performative possibilities. Even though the will toward binaries persists— in our twenty-four-hour news cycle, political debates, Twitter feeds, and oftentimes our classrooms—critical generosity resists the false imperative to choose an oversimplified side or perform according to a limiting script. This resistance is precisely what makes critical generosity useful to feminist teachers at this moment in time. Building on the work of David Román and Jill Dolan, I offer critical generosity as a performance and practice that provides generative, holistic possibilities for feminist teachers who want to imagine more expansive pedagogical performances for themselves and their students.

Critical generosity functions as both a performance that turns outward in service of students in the feminist classroom and a practice that turns inward in service of feminist teachers’ pedagogical development and well-being. In both cases, the teacher is the performer of critical generosity. Because students produce work that teachers evaluate, they are also performers, but not necessarily performers of critical generosity. In the first case (what I’m calling performance), students are the audience and thus the potential recipients of critical generosity turned outward. In the second case (what I’m calling practice), the teacher herself is the audience and evaluator of her own pedagogical performance; importantly, she is also the potential recipient of her own critical generosity turned inward. Separating performance and practice allows for the examination of acts of performing and practicing with different audiences (students and self) in mind. Of course, these performances and practices mutually inform and sustain each other. The separation is a necessary fiction.

While Román and Dolan apply critical generosity in the context of theatre criticism, I extend their concept of critical generosity by turning the lens on different objects of analysis—namely, feminist pedagogical performances and student work. A key difference to note from the outset is that in theatre criticism, the performances under consideration are marked as performances and evaluated as such, while teaching is generally an unmarked performance with different, and arguably more diffuse, conventions and occasions for evaluation. Viewing student work as a performance is likely straightforward for most teachers because we are so accustomed to evaluating and ranking student work. However, as I’ll discuss in more detail later, viewing teaching through a performance lens is a choice.

Good Girls and Feminist Killjoys: Pedagogical Performance in the Feminist Classroom

Pedagogical performance refers to teachers’ embodied performances in the classroom as well as our performances of identity in documents such as syllabi, assignment sheets, and feedback on student work. Such performances extend to email correspondence with students, and perhaps even further to how teachers decide to decorate our offices or classrooms. In short, pedagogical performance refers to what teachers make apparent to audiences and also considers what we conceal. The absences in our pedagogical performances can be just as or more significant than the presences. For example, staying silent in response to a hateful remark during class discussion could be read as an endorsement of the remark, and the absence of a smile in any number of pedagogical encounters could be read as disapproval.

Not unlike the Madonna-whore dichotomy, the roles available to feminist teachers can feel polarized: either the “good girl” who embodies an ethic of care (Noddings) or a pedagogy of tenderness (Thompson), or the “bad girl” who is best described most recently by...