World, Class, Women

Global Literature, Education, and Feminism

Robin Truth Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134000739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

World, Class, Women begins the extraordinarily important task of bringing a postcolonial, feminist voice to critical pedagogy and, by extension explores how current debates about education could make a contribution to feminist thought. Robin Truth Goodman deftly weaves together the disciplines of literature, postcolonialism, feminism, and education in order to theorize how the shrinking of the public sphere and the rise of globalization influence access to learning, what counts as knowledge, and the possibilities of a radical feminism.

CHAPTER 1
Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Legacy

Here we are only concerned with the obvious fact, when it comes to considering this important question—how we are to help you prevent war—that education makes a difference.

—Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

In 1938, as Europe was about to lead the world into a brutal conflagration, Virginia Woolf recognized the urgency for a fundamental educational change. This educational change would necessarily include economic transformation. As well, Woolf understood that without this change, there would be an inevitable spiraling toward escalating militarism and widespread destruction. Today, as the United States has sparked off a major global conflict that will probably ignite others, Virginia Woolf’s lessons remain unlearned.

In an essay entitled “Crossing the Boundaries of Educational Discourse: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism” published in 1992, Henry Giroux acknowledges critical pedagogy’s indebtedness to feminism. Feminism has, Giroux remarks, “asserted the primacy of social criticism” (63), suggested “a complex relationship between material social practices and the construction of subjectivity through the use of language” (65), “provided a theoretical context and politics for enriching postmodernism’s analyses of reason and totality” (66), and welcomed “the postmodern emphasis on the proliferation of local narratives, the opening up of the world to cultural and ethnic differences, and the positing of difference as a challenge to hegemonic power relations parading as universals” (68). Indeed, not only has the particular postmodern feminism to which Giroux refers contributed to thinking the radical in politics and education, but feminist thought was originally formulated as a radical theory of education.

The reason to consider the history of feminist thought as it has influenced and could influence critical pedagogy is not only to expand the canon of theory or traditions within critical pedagogy. Neither is the purpose here simply to include “silenced others” in an endless parsing of differences, or, as Kathleen Weiler has proposed, “challenging the structure of traditional canon […and] suggesting alternative classroom practices” (2001:68). Additionally, as Virginia Woolf well knew, the history of feminist thought offers an imperative to reconceptualize the relationship between the private and the public spheres built up with industrialism, and this reconceptualization is vital to the future of education. Mary Wollstonecraft herself taught that politics, civic virtue, and justice resided in such a reconceptualization, for, she argued, only when women escaped from domestic confinement and dependence would they exercise the free will on which equality, antiauthoritarianism, and civic knowledge could be built. Mary Wollstonecraft did not seek to unmoor a doctrine of separate spheres in which mothering would be to women what soldiering was to men. Yet, in making this equation, Wollstonecraft saw that in order to broaden political participation and economic access, redefining women’s labors as civic labors was central, and so women’s positions were not to be marginalized, dominated, and locked away from public reason. My project here is to reassess the history of feminist thought and, in so doing, to retrieve the elements, ideas, and symbolic connections that are useful to a theory of liberation, a feminist politics, a culture of democracy, and a rethinking of the meanings of education.

Following on Wollstonecraft’s polemic, the legacy of feminist thought teaches that the nonregulated private sphere undermines the civic potential of education because it reaffirms a gender system based on inefficiency, excessive and wasteful indulgences, despotism, violence, and savagery. In a sense, Wollstonecraft is picking up where Foucault left off (so to speak), identifying the private bedroom as the extension of power rather than a refuge or resistance from it, only Wollstonecraft then metaphorizes the bedroom, in the mode of the classical tradition of political theorists like Aristotle, to show that the relationships of the private bedroom model the broader relationships of authority and tyranny in politics. Feminism then argues that civic virtue needs to be embedded in the private sphere in order for the public to stop conforming to the dictatorships of private power, so that feminist discourse would infuse private identity with the order of the public and the concept of democratic participation for the purposes of politics and freedom. Remarks, for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1898 classic Women and Economics, “[W]hen we see how much of our improve-ment is due to gains made in hygienic knowledge, in public provision for education and sanitary regulation, none of which has been accomplished by mothers, we are forced to see that whatever advance the race has made is not exclusively attributable to motherhood” (1998:93). Requiring an attention to public institutions, deliberations, and social nets in the feminist reconceptualization of the private sphere, educating women to know equality and to resist deception would depend on building public supports that would vitally reform social relations even in the home and the possibilities of progress. Feminism was, from its beginnings, a call not only to educate more, but also, by educating more, to educate differently.

This demand for civic ideas to be the basis of private exchange inverts the current liberal, corporate ideologies that Zygmunt Bauman has criticized as the “therapy for present ills” where “we live also through a period of the privatization of utopia and of the models of the good” (1999:7), where, in other words, public potentials are thought of in private terms. “The art of reforging private troubles into public issues,” he warns “is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten; private troubles tend to be redefined in a way that renders exceedingly difficult their ‘agglomeration,’ and thus their condensation into a political force” (1999:7). This state of affairs results, says Bauman, from the “passing of control over crucial economic factors from representative institutions of government to the free play of market forces” (1999:19), in other words, from the privatization of public power, which gives rise to feelings of insecurity.

An example of how the logic of the private is so prevalently operating can be found in a recent demonstration I went to at the university where I work, Florida State University. The demonstration was organized by students who were living in tents on the campus green in order to protest the agency the university was employing to monitor the sweatshops where the university’s sports clothing was manufactured (the students favored the WRC, or Workers’ Rights Consortium). The university was using police action to remove the students from the green, including shutting off the water and locking the buildings after hours, claiming that the “tent city” was unsafe and unsanitary even though the university has a custom of allowing students to camp out on the green the night before football games. During the protest, where students were going to march to the administrative office to dialogue with the police, I overheard two students talking. One of the students said to the other that the “tent city” students should be allowed to stay on the green because they paid tuition and so in a sense they “owned” the green. In other words, these students could not think of political action as outside of private rights, and they could not imagine the public—as in the public university—belonging to them through any other means besides private ownership. They could not think, for instance, of their protest as a protection of their constitutional rights to assembly or as part of a tradition of civil disobedience, or that the public university itself should promise a space for the expression and discussion of opinions and redress in democratic deliberation. In other words, the system of private ownership, which they were protesting in sweatshops, was providing the only available logic in which they could frame the logic of their politics, their participation, and their protest.

For Bauman, the growth in therapeutic culture is directly related to the widespread inability to think the public. This inability incites the growth in such cultures of insecurity where “power is increasingly removed from politics—a circumstance which accounts simultaneously for growing political apathy, the progressive disinterestedness of the electorate in everything ‘political’ except the juicy scandals perpetrated by top people in the limelight, and the waning of expectations that salvation may come from government buildings, whoever their current or future occupants may be” (1999:19). The intensification of corporate governance over public issues is played out in a therapeutic culture, which passes the responsibility for public problems onto private individuals and which also blames social insecurities on private crimes (e.g., family dysfunctionality causing psychological maladaptions), meaning that public communities are envisioned as full of “fear, suspicion, and hate” (14) because of individual failings and so needing micromanagement by private concerns, “interventions,” and market remedies.

The problem is, of course, that corporate power does not fix such social insecurities but rather creates them, driving wages down, demanding the lowering of government spending and the tax base, endangering the environment, busting unions, and the like, all giving legitimation to the growth of the disciplinary security state which, in its turn, incites even greater insecurity. In the face of this breakdown in the cultures of democracy, Giroux has expounded on the need for public schools to defend public cultures, as public services are increasingly defunded and noncommercial spaces are disappearing. For Giroux, as corporate culture has come to dominate political institutions including schools, it is vital, for the survival of democracy, to develop a sense of public agency as autonomous from the imperatives of the market: “[t]he continued devaluation of education as a public good points to the need for educators to work together to reclaim schools as democratic public goods” (2000:26). Drawing on Antonio Gramsci, Giroux has developed a sense of the public necessary for democratic action and agency, where “common sense and consent were being constructed within public spheres marked by the emergence of new technologies and specific, yet shifting, educational practices” (2000:110) but also where “alternative cultural spheres might be transformed into sites of struggle and resistance” (2000:111). Like Wollstonecraft, Woolf, and Gilman, Giroux wants education to stand for the different kinds of thought and action that different configurations of private and public power would promise.

Wollstonecraft warned that there would be neither freedom nor peace as long as women were barred from free and rational thought by domestic domination, because submission to a singular command in marriage, as in the military, obstructs ambition, creating instead extravagance, vice, and uselessness: “I shall scarcely excite surprise,” she notes, “by adding my firm persuasion that every profession, in which great subordination of rank constitutes its power, is highly injurious to morality. A standing army, for instance, is incompatible with freedom; because subordination and rigour are the very sinews of military discipline; and despotism is necessary to give vigour to enterprises that one will directs” (17). Likewise, Giroux understands the domination of the private—this time, of private and corporate ownership—impeding the ability of students to think the end of oppression and to reclaim a political role. The tyranny of the king, which Wollstonecraft found so abhorrent and inimical to free thought, and the tyranny of fascism, which Woolf feared, has returned here as the tyranny of the global corporation.¹

Woolf, Wollstonecraft, and Gilman specifically relegated the idea of the private to the home. As Woolf explains, “Your class [men] possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically all the capital, all the land, all the valuables, and all the patronage in England. Our class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically none of the capital, none of the land, none of the valuables, and none of the patronage in England” (18). A comparison between Giroux’s critical pedagogy and this early feminist thinking of educational change demonstrates how that idea of the private has circulated into other power dynamics besides the home, and how Woolf’s idea about masculine power as consolidated capital accumulation now is oriented through a culture of corporatism. The private, in Giroux’s analysis of power, stands both for the opposite to the public—a space devoid of dialogue, deliberation, participation, and institutional access as the backbone of democratic culture—and for a depoliticized version of the personal, where private action and sentiment are circumscribed as outside of broader economic, cultural, and historical struggles. In defense of the private as the basis of property and thus of a liberalized notion of identity, corporate culture has defended its own transcendence of the law of the nation-state, its hostility to taxation and regulation, and its right to finance political campaigns in order to influence candidates’ policy initiatives. Though the early feminist movement had not yet conceived a politics of the public sphere, one can still look to this critique for alternatives to the concentration of private power. By considering the way feminist thought has historically contended the power of the private, I here build on Giroux’s insightful analysis of the way power operates by defining and dividing the public from the private. I argue that the private in Giroux’s sense still carries in it some of the attributes of femininity with which early feminist writing attributed it, as well as the same dangers to democracy.

Intertwined with the privatization of public power, the feminization of corporate labor has, in fact, contributed to its depoliticization. Where flexibility and mobility are more and more considered as the virtues of capital, some of the historical features of domestic production have been absorbed into current corporate practices. As well, corporations have manipulated attributes and moral attitudes of gender to produce value in the workforce. Observes Angela Davis,

Although the “housewife” was rooted in the social conditions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, nineteenth-century ideology established the housewife and the mother as universal models of womanhood. Since popular propaganda represented the vocation of all women as a function of their roles in the home, women compelled to work for wages came to be treated as alien visitors within the masculine world of the public economy. Having stepped outside their “natural” sphere, women were not to be treated as full-fledged wage workers. The price they paid involved long hours, substandard working conditions and grossly inadequate wages. Their exploitation was even more intense than the exploitation suffered by their male counterparts. Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of outrageous super-profits for the capitalists.
(229)

Melissa W.Wright has shown how “housewife” discourses of feminine helplessness, victimization, and temporalness on the one hand, and promiscuity and moral depravity on the other, have justified the maquiladoras’ cheapening of labor on the Mexican border. As male workers are seen as more “loyal,” they are trained in higher skilled jobs with greater technological involvement. “She, however,” remarks Wright about the female Mexican worker, “is stuck in the endless loop of her decline […] First, [the Mexican woman] establishes the standard for recognizing the production of value in people and in things: Value appreciates in what is not her. Second, she incorporates flexibility into the labor supply through her turnover” (127). The willful changing of jobs on the part of the women workers was not encouraged by low wages, lack of child care, lack of training, or bad working conditions, the managers insisted, but rather by the girls’ own cultural waywardness, their lack of “loyalty.”

Wright is here discussing how over two hundred women workers in the industrial city of Juarez were murdered and their bodies discarded in the desert over a period of five years in the late 1990s. The corporate managers responded by blaming their deaths on the cultural dissolution that they maintained the women represented, where, they claimed, the demise of values led women to seek “experiences.” Even when a woman was killed by the company’s own bus driver, the corporate managers could displace responsibility for the murders onto the women themselves by suggesting that going out at night meant lack of loyalty to the culture, the patriarchy, and the family in the same way that lack of loyalty to the corporation meant high job turnover among women workers. As such, the Mexican woman laborer “can be nothing other than a temporary worker, one whose intrinsic value does not mature, grow, and increase over time. And therefore, as a group, Mexican women represent the permanent labor force of the temporarily employed” (143). With the growing needs of capital to cut costs in order to counter falling rates of profit, the contingency of women to the private sphere and to the domestic has justified a deepening of their exploitation through corporate expansion. The private lives of women—alongside stereotypical associations of the “feminine” and the reduction of women to their sex—are used along the Mexican border to defend the privatization of production, the deregulation of public oversight, the privatization of public services like transportation, the reason for labor’s de-unionization, and capital’s lack of commitment, or “loyalty” to the community from which it profits or to its safety.

The feminist critique of critical pedagogy has not recognized critical pedagogy’s potential to oppose gender oppression because of its comprehensive analysis of and resistance to the power of the private. In fact, coming out of Deweyan progressivism and feminist consciousness-raising of the 1960s and 1970s while linking educational theorizing to the new social movements, a field called “feminist pedagogy” has been staging a critique against critical pedagogy precisely for what its adherents interpret as critical pedagogy’s antifeminism. Elizabeth Ellsworth, for example, has argued, “To the extent that our efforts to put discourses of critical pedagogy into practice led us to reproduce relations of domination in our classroom, these discourses were “working through” us in repressive ways, and had themselves become vehicles of repression” (1994:301), and Patti Lather has reproached critical pedagogy for “its reinscription of prescriptive universalizing,” concluding that “critical pedagogy in the contemporary moment is still very much a boy thing” (2001:184). “Feminist pedagogy” has accused critical pedagogy of not paying due attention to such core educational concerns as nurturance, feeling, authority, relationships, voice, difference, self-esteem, marginalization, cognition, experience, and resistance. Yet, this assumption of “privatized” attributes—caring and psychology (emotion, relationality, interiority)—to the feminine is re-creating the historic and discursive context for deepening gender oppression. As Jane Gallop has observed, “Maternal pedagogy might appear utopian but it is also subject to traditionally gendered prescription” (35). Feminist pedagogical critique creates social visions that, in celebrating the current position of women and the meanings of femininity, reinforce oppressive economic relations.

In his early work The Consumer Society, Jean Baudrillard discusses how the market destroys social relations and then offers them back up in images of solicitude. For Baudrillard, advertising provides an “ideology of a society which is continually taking care of you” (167) through a manipulation of emotions and motivations that he calls “terroristic.” As capitalism destroys families by destroying the political institutions that support them, for example, the consumer society presents instead proliferating scenarios of motherly enticement and tenderness which cover up for the impoverishment of social life and replaces real attachments. For Baudrillard, this replacement is pedagogical: “If you don’t know what it is to be happy” Baudrillard cites in a TWA advertisement, “we’ll teach you. We know better than you” (169). The production of advertising as mothering effectively reveals the compatibility between, on the one hand, the destruction of support networks, fields of functional relationships, and public security systems, and, on the other, their anxious and accelerated replacement by signs and ceremonial narratives of sincerity, warmth, authenticity, humanity, and sentiment. The simulation of motherhood at the same time suppresses knowledge of its own magical production as it turns us all into orphans by reducing the compassionate role of the state. When unconcerned with its own political complicities, pedagogical theory worried centrally about reproducing the experience of human connection plays into a broader assault on these same values as they get subsumed in their own simulation.

Even as “feminist pedagogues” do not realize the need to contend the power of the private, the domination of the private is repeated in the historical cheapening of women’s labor. As Pierre Bourdieu has explained why schools reproduce old relations of gender,

Men continue to dominate the public space and the field of power (especially economic power—over production) whereas women remain (predominantly) assigned to the private space (domestic space, the site of reproduction) […] or to the quasi-extensions of the domestic space, the welfare services (especially medical services) and education […] [T]his is because [the sexual division relating to disciplines, careers and jobs] act[s] through three practical principles which women, and also their social circles, apply in their choices. The first is that the functions appropriate to women are an extension of their domestic functions—education, care and service. The second is that a woman cannot have authority over men […] The third principle gives men the monopoly of the handling of technical objects and machines. (93–94)

“Feminist pedagogy” simply reaffirms the gender relations that have created the symbolic justification for the corporate-sponsored worldwide impoverishm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Legacy
• Chapter 2: The Philosopher’s Stoned
• Chapter 3: A Time for Flying Horses
• Chapter 4: The Triumphant but Tragic Wealth of the Poor
• Chapter 5: Homework
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author