Love and Repudiation in the Feminist Canon

Thinking back across three decades of teaching in gender studies, the author offers a pedagogical history of the evolution of what is arguably the most widely required course in the curriculum of the field today: feminist theory. Along the way, she considers the relationship between critical adoration and critique, couched in the language of the essay’s title as love and repudiation, in order to speculate on the changing political contours in which different generations of students have encountered the feminist classroom and its privileged texts.