Performing Self, Performing Community, Performing Care: A Polyphony

We must do everything we can to provide every speaker with the opportunity and the power to participate fully in cultural practices and to critically intervene in them and call into question their normative structure. In short, we need to fight discursive disempowerment with discursive empowerment, silence with speech.

—Medina 192

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.

—hooks, Teaching Community 197

. . . [P]erformance always entails risk . . .

—Hamington 36

This article traces a performative arc across time and distance, starting in the men’s carceral setting in which the coauthors¹ first met in a gender studies course called Writing as Activism; through their continued co-learning (and individual authorship of self) in a campus-based course, Women, Writing, and Memoir; to and through the co-construction of this essay. These co-authors are variously situated relative to the institutions in which they were and are positioned; embody difference related to race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion, age, and national origin; and are co-committed both to creating learning communities in which a socially just pedagogy might be enacted through performance of self, of community, and of care, and to sharing about that experience as if, in the words of José Medina, “from elsewhere.”

Starting “From Elsewhere”

Our work together started in a place that is designed and constructed to be quite “elsewhere”: the state correctional institution in which Writing as Activism (originally designed by co-author Vicki Reitenauer as a campus-based course and offered since 2016 within carceral facilities as an Inside-Out course²) took place. Twice a week, for the eleven weeks of spring term 2017, twelve Portland State students, including co-author Lindsay Goldman, processed into a state minimum-security correctional facility where co-author Musonda Mwango and eleven other incarcerated men waited in Classroom 4. In this practice- and process-oriented class, all of those in the room (including the instructor) contributed to the constructing of course content and the facilitation of class time. These shared content-and-process responsibilities included selecting readings for inclusion in weekly reading packets; co-designing and co-facilitating class activities, including weekly writing workshops; and serving as writing coaches and sources of constructive critique. Each participant began the term generating a critical self-reflection in which they adopted learning and writing goals and identified one or more explicit writing projects they were taking on for the term. At term’s end, participants revisited their learning and writing goals in critical self-reflection, which included their claiming of their grade for their efforts in the course.³

During the weeks that we met, related, and learned together across institutional lines, we unwittingly began the collaboration that led to this essay. As we again worked together in the learning community formed in the campus-based course Women, Writing, and Memoir (which Musonda registered for following his release), we found ourselves drawing directly on the knowledge we had co-produced through our earlier course as we became actors in a new setting. We engaged in conversation together to make sense of our new experiences in light of our former ones, interrogating the meaning of our individual and collective practices in the forging of new ways of being as learners, writers, and collaborators. Having started from the “elsewhere” of a state prison—and under the guise of individual selves sitting in a circle in a classroom in that space—we have traveled, together and alone, to a sense-making place, a place for wondering how we might continue to engage in performative liberatory change-making practice through claiming our selves, welcoming others, and forging bonds of genuine care.

Co-Creating Our Feminist Classroom

This inquiry into the meaning of our practice(s) leads us to claim that radical possibility in feminist classrooms emerges from...