Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Masculinities

Learning Beyond Stereotypes

Sveva Magaraggia, Gerlinde Mauerer, Marianne Schmidbaur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429513862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Minority Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Masculinities looks at teaching non-hegemonic forms of masculinities and highlights their diversity. The collection foregrounds and discusses concepts which are described and gathered as positive, caring, and inclusive masculinities, thus offering a timely and much-needed counterpoint to discussions of so-called toxic masculinity.

The volume presents a wide range of theoretical reflections, case studies, and teaching resources for lecturers in higher education and practitioners in the fields of gender studies, pedagogy, and education. Its heterogeneity is based on an interdisciplinary approach, methodological variety, cross-cultural spectrum, and empirical richness, reflected in various contributions from Europe, Africa, US, and Asia. The international scope of the book and its transnational perspective is valuable in broadening perspectives on teaching masculinities. The presentation and discussion of national and local programs and campaigns promoting teaching practices on masculinities and gender provide further valuable insights into learning beyond stereotypes and realizing new concepts of masculinities.

By presenting alternative performances of masculinities and fostering masculinities studies which are oriented towards gender equality and/or going beyond gender norms, Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Masculinities offers a strong response to the backlashes against feminism and gender studies from rising nationalism coupled with hegemonic masculinities.

PART I

Higher education

1

THE POWER OF CRITICAL FEMINIST PEDAGOGY IN CHALLENGING “LEARNIFICATION” AND THE NEOLIBERAL ETHOS

Kristiina Brunila

Introduction: critical feminist pedagogy and the neoliberal ethos

In an era of multiple crises (economic, educational, cultural, identity, masculinities, etc.) the promotion of equality and diversity has experienced numerous tensions. In Nordic countries, where this chapter is contextualized, the neoliberal ethos and the rather extreme degree of marketization of equality policies and practices have created a rather critical and pessimistic attitude toward the potential of promoting gender equality and diversity (Kantola and Lombardo 2017; Brunila and Ylöstalo 2015). In relation to these differences, there seems to be a longing for stricter control of the definition of gender, race/ethnicity, and nationality.

In addition, training and further education in universities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have gone through major changes under the current neoliberal ethos (Brunila and Valero 2018; Gill 2009; Davies 2005). This ethos is shifting educational policies and practices related to teaching toward individual responsibility. Another huge turn is being made in education and learning from teaching to individual-based learning and “learnification” (Biesta 2014). This means that education and teaching are beginning to lose their traditional meanings while the whole educational process is shifting towards the production of prespecified learning outcomes and predefined abstract identities, such as the good citizen or the flexible lifelong learner equipped with specific predetermined types of skills and competences. “Learnification” enhances implementation of individualized educational and training practices and, for example, groups and categorizes students in accordance with their supposed predetermined learning abilities.

University teachers have experienced these pressures in the form of demands for implementation of “learnification” in their teaching, replete with demands they have to show visible dividends in increased efficiency and performativity as a result of this shift in methodology. In parallel, they have to deal with increasing expectations on teaching and learning. In connection with this demand, the position of a university teacher has become rather complex and ambivalent. Teaching has become a process of both doing and undoing the neoliberal discourse which has managed to take hold of academic teaching. While engagement with neoliberalism has been seen as necessary, pleasurable, and dangerous all at the same time, a sense of power to resist does exist (Davies and Petersen 2005).

In order to promote critical thinking, change, and counter-politics, teaching and pedagogy should be able to face the challenge of the current neoliberal ethos and learnification in order to enhance an ideal abstract, neoliberal, self-sustainable, entrepreneurial, and flexible subjectivity/learner identity. The purpose of this chapter is to explore theoretically how to bring feminist pedagogy to life through teaching while critically reflecting neoliberal restructuring of education. In this chapter, feminist pedagogy is understood as a form of counter-political and scientific strategy informed by questioning relations constructed between the subject, agency, and politics which are believed to have the power to, in turn, question the neoliberal ethos. This chapter is based on the author’s and her colleagues’ experiences and scientific contributions as critical feminist scholars struggling to find theoretical, methodological, and political ways to contribute to teaching by addressing questions related to power and equality (e.g. Brunila and Valero 2018; Brunila and Rossi 2018; Ikävalko and Brunila 2017; Ylöstalo and Brunila 2017; Brunila and Ylöstalo 2015; Brunila 2013; Brunila and Edström 2013).

The power of the feminist poststructural and discursive approach

As a critical scholar, I have never been interested in research or teaching simply for its own sake. I am keen on researching and teaching politically relevant topics that help make sense of this world in terms of social justice and inequalities. In regard to critical feminist pedagogy, the poststructural and discursive approach I present here is based on dynamic and productive properties of discourse, differences, and subjectivity.

Feminist pedagogy has traditionally been considered a critical form of pedagogy that aims to challenge dominant hierarchical gender relations. At the same time, this pedagogy is intended to empower students using politics of emancipation to encourage resistance to phallocentric knowledge supposedly gender neutral in nature, as well as traditional, patriarchal teacher/student relations (e.g. Ylöstalo and Brunila 2017; Luke 1996, 283; Luke and Gore 1992; Weiler 1991). Accordingly, feminist pedagogy aims to critique and change the unequal social relations embedded in contemporary society. Teachers committed to feminist pedagogy strive to develop a learning environment where students can work together and learn collaboratively through dialogue (e.g. Ylöstalo and Brunila 2017; Mayberry 1998; hooks 1994). In this way, feminist pedagogy elaborates on a multitude of differences, including gender, ethnicity/race, sexuality, and class (Mayberry 1998).

This chapter is based on ideas of feminist pedagogy in addition to a poststructural and discursive approach to education and teaching (e.g. Youdell 2006; Britzman 2003; St. Pierre and Pillow 2000; Lather 1991; Weedon 1987). This approach is useful in examining and challenging the current power relations and the making of subjectivities in the current neoliberal ethos, and in bringing back homo politicus through teaching (Brown 2015).

As political theorist Wendy Brown (2015) has argued, instead of enhancing homo politicus, the neoliberal ethos tends to strengthen homo oeconomicus. This idea is related to the Cartesian theory of subjectivity, the idea that humans are authentic, essential, malleable, and potential. The current shift towards “learnification” (Biesta 2014) also means a form of subjectivity. Gert Biesta (2014) has argued that because of learnification in educational discourse, it is more difficult to ask crucial educational questions about the purpose and content of education and its wider societal, historical, cultural, and political relations. Learnification also tends to rely on neuropsychological ideas of a rather fixed and abstract subjectivity. The critique of the Cartesian self-sustaining subject has been advanced in poststructural theories and their approach to subjectivity for quite some time in multiple fields (e.g. Lloyd 2005; Hall 2000; Derrida 1981; Foucault 1970). Feminist poststructural research reminds us that authentic, self-sustaining, and essential characteristics have often been interpreted within a Western, white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual, and mainstream identity in the field of identity politics.

The neoliberal ethos (and the learnification transacting it) is currently spreading in teaching and learning. These methods are characterized by a dismissal of critical reflections on societal and situational power relations, differences, and understanding of subjectivities as multiple, diverse, changeable, and contradictory. Feminist poststructural theories, for their part, reach beyond authenticity and the pursuit of freedom, emancipation, and empowerment toward critical scrutiny of dominating discursive practices and ideal and normative ways of being.

In critical feminist pedagogy, it is crucial to understand through which frames one is interpreting the world. For example, how do university teachers as well as students constitute themselves and their being and doing in various institutional and noninstitutional configurations plagued by the tensions of wider societal power relations? It is unlikely that an abstract learner/student/teacher or any kind of subjectivity is found outside wider societal power relations. Therefore, for critical feminist pedagogy it is important to find approaches to societal questions that make sense of the world and our thinking. Understood in this way, teaching is always political.

Critical feminist pedagogy with a poststructural and discursive approach allows one to examine the function of societal and other power relations. This approach can be used to examine the relationship between knowledge and power, the function of power, and the relationship between power and subjectivity in various contexts. By promoting a more critical feminist approach to pedagogy we can become more sensitive to the influence of power dynamics: how “truths” are a reflection of normative ways of being and doing and differences, such as gender and ideas about the right kind of knowledge and knowing, are produced, maintained, and negotiated.

For example, as analyzed in our previous work, what our definition of gender is affects what we set as teaching objectives and the way we pursue these objectives (Brunila et al. 2005). At the same time, how we define gender also affects the outcomes of our pedagogy. The aforementioned authors argue that a crucial obstacle to the advancement of equality seems to be that the division into two categories has resulted in assumptions about the fundamental dissimilarity between women and men. In this model, women and men are seen as complementing each other in a manner whereby the two together form a complete human being. This way of thinking includes an assumption of the heterosexuality of the parties involved. What makes this problematic in terms of equality is that characteristics that are labeled as masculine are seen as more valuable than those considered feminine. This, in turn, tends to strengthen assumptions of the value differences between the environments of the two genders. This assumption of differing characteristics can lead to different treatment of each gendered individual, an action which perpetuates exhibition of differences that strengthen assumptions of gender-bound characteristics (Brunila et al. 2005). Feminist critical pedagogy offers an opportunity to challenge and break this vicious cycle.

Critical feminist pedagogy is interested in the way discourse constructs and produces “truth”, difference, and subjectivity. Therefore, a discursive approach that emphasizes power analysis is useful. In creating a feminist critical pedagogy, an important step is realization of the constitutive nature of the subject that enables people to act within established forms of power. This realization opens opportunities to explore the possibility of speaking and acting beyond the process of submitting to and mastering discourse. It is crucial to acknowledge the critical perspectives related to different discourses, because they offer alternative ways of seeing and thinking about subjectivity. The intersection of critical tradition and feminist theory can help strengthen our sensitivity to societal differences, from gender, femininities, and masculinities to class, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, health, and dis/ability. It can also offer the potential to increase our engagement with everyday politics and our resistance to neoliberal pressures in teaching. One of the key guidelines in teaching is to demonstrate and remind ourselves that the choices people make stem not only from the individual, but from the condition of possibility: discourses which prescribe not only what is desirable, but also recognize what is an acceptable form of subjectivity (Butler 2008).

From identity politics to an intersectional approach

In the alliance between neoliberal ethos and learnification, the ideal subjectivity is individual, resilient, empowered, flexible, entrepreneurial, and innovative, and thus, is rather naïve of wider societal differences. Nevertheless, this ideal upholds the Cartesian view of both the subject and knowledge: i.e. the binary opposition between the dominant mind and submissive body. In this order, woman, feminine, and black, for example, are marked in contrast to the unmarked terms of men, masculine, and white (Brunila and Rossi 2018; Hall, 2000). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that neither the neoliberal ethos nor learnification address ethical questions related to power dynamics or differences in gender, ethnicity/color, health, social class, religion, or sexuality. This ignorance demonstrates the limits in this thinking where subjects are conditioned to implicitly accept societal differences.

Critical feminist pedagogy acknowledges the various socially and culturally formed prejudices and norms that both restrict and shape people’s being and doing. Refusing to acknowledge these cultural and societal aspects and power relations, teachers easily end up reproducing structural inequalities and a particular kind of identity politics that privileges white, wealthy, competitive, and heterosexual Western subjects (Brunila and Rossi 2018). Accordingly, teaching in the neoliberal ethos and within learnification limits and diminishes the meaning of subjectivity, while encouraging its proponents to locate problems as self-based rather than societal. In this way, teaching ends up enhancing identity politics by aiming to autonomize the self without shattering its formerly autonomous character. This particular discourse of autonomization and accountability connects political rhetoric to the self-steering capacities of the subjects themselves, creating normative individuals who are mentally and emotionally healthy, adaptable, autonomous, responsible, flexible, and self-centered. At the same time, these individuals are then considered resilient enough to take responsibility for the emotional damage caused by the neoliberal ethos (Brunila and Rossi 2018).

In the ideal neoliberal narrative, the autonomous self can discover itself through a fixed identity, by acknowledging its individual faults and deficiencies, getting rid of psychic and emotional vulnerabilities, and becoming a self-disciplinary and emancipative agent that is suitably flexible, innovative, and resilient when it encounters challenges. This type of orientation within the neoliberal ethos prioritizes a specific and narrow type of gender order where masculinity is considered the opposite of femininity. This division results in assumptions around the fundamental dissimilarity of women and men, or vice versa. What makes this assumption problematic is that characteristics that are labeled masculine are seen as more valuable than those considered feminine (see Brunila et al. 2005).

An illusion of individual autonomy is created as a consequence of autonomizing the self and making it accountable for its actions. In teaching, this means addressing subjectivity as a particular individualized and normative type, endowed with hopes and ambitions waiting to be recognized and fulfilled, that is, not shaping people to conform through force, but rather enabling them to recognize what is good on their own. In this way, neoliberal ideal subjectivity offers limited opportunities to speak and be heard by encouraging self-blame.

This is where feminist critical pedagogy has great potential to expand opportunities to examine and critique circumstances that can be normative, discriminating, suppressive, and hierarchical. Here a theory of discursive practices is useful (e.g. Ikävalko and Brunila 2017; Ikävalko 2016). This does not mean abandonment of the subject, but rather a reinterpretation of the subject in its displaced or decentered position (Ikävalko et al. 2017; Hall 2000; Foucault 1970).

In teaching, as poststructuralist ps...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Higher Education
• Part II New Caring Perspectives
• Part III Anti-Violence. Gender Transformative Work with Men and Boys
• Epilogue
• Index