Because I am interested in the reciprocal relationship between action and identity, I would like to spend some time exploring in this essay how I self-define as ‘feminist,’ not least because what at first appears to be a straightforward task to a mainstream audience (‘I believe men and women are equal!’) is actually quite a complex question, one that I have grappled with for quite some time, and one that involves much more than simply gender equality or an attention to gender. Indeed, as the central discussion of this roundtable suggests, my definition of feminism has much to do with the spaces I inhabit and the rhetorical choices that I makes within those spaces, and it is influenced by a variety of tensions, including that between activism and intellectual inquiry. With these chief concerns in mind, I will focus on my role and experience working in the academy, both as student and instructor, with the awareness that my academic actions and identity are largely implicated in my actions and identity outside the academy as well – a point to which I will return at the end of this essay. As a way of framing my discussion, I would like to ask the following question: What is ‘feminist’ about my pedagogy and academic practice, and what are the stakes of assigning that label? To get to this question requires what may admittedly seem like a digression at first.

In the Academy

In my scholarship, over the past year, I have been investigating the relation of ‘the personal’ to academic writing. Originally, this was simply a question for me about the difference between being a ‘writer’ and being a ‘critic.’ As writing became increasingly difficult for me and I sought to understand why, I began to query what an appropriate ethos is to academic writing: when is it allowable to talk about one’s personal responses/reactions in a paper, or to write using rhetoric that does not imply absolute objectivity (e.g. avoids passive voice)? As critics, we invest much time and energy into examining various ‘identities’ and ‘subjectivities’ of others – and largely in, I would argue, the abstract. So I was struck by Maria Torgovnick’s description of a “heady moment” she had after presenting to her writing group (non-academics, aside from her) an ‘experimental’ piece of writing that drew from her affective response to her topic: The audience “asked questions about my ‘intentions’ and ‘effects’ that made me feel like a writer, not just a critic” (8). In popular understanding, critics tear things apart, break them down, whereas writers build them up, construct: notice the sense of insufficiency that Torgovnick’s use of “not just a critic” (my emphasis) evokes and how feeling like a “writer” counteracts this. ‘Critic’ attempts to render moot the very subjectivity that ‘writer’ invites.

My dissatisfaction with an unwillingness among academics to accept scholarship that acknowledges the nature of one’s personal commitments (such as Torgovnick’s) catapulted me from critical theory and literature into rhetoric and composition studies, where I felt different forms of ‘knowledge-building’ were better supported, and where I felt, for the first time, free to explore my own subjectivity, which my academic career up until that point had led me to believe was not appropriate but which I felt to be both an ethical and political move. This shift helped me see that I was not solely interested in exploring who I am as a ‘writer,’ but also my other identities that intersect with who I am as an academic: ‘woman,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘atheist,’ ‘white,’ ‘feminist,’ to name a few. And this was an interest that transferred to my work as an instructor and influenced my approach to my students and the kind of writing I ask them to do.

In the Classroom

This year I have taught English composition with a service learning requirement. In my class, service involves tutoring in underfunded Seattle Public Schools. I ask students to journal about each volunteer experience, and later in the course, these journal entries become material for writing assignments that involve their personal experiences and reactions. For the purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on two student responses to one particular assignment that I designed. Not only were they unexpected, but they prompted me to rethink my pedagogical approach in a way that has proven extremely meaningful for me and students in subsequent sections of the class.

The project I’d like to note is one that asked students to write a ‘critical research narrative’ that reflected on the progress they made over the course of the quarter. This was, as far as I knew, effectively a genre that I had invented. I hoped it would provide students the opportunity to engage in more ‘personal’ writing (which has proven more meaningful to students in my service learning course) without sacrificing the kind of ‘critical’ engagement that the outcomes of the course demand of students. I envisioned students drawing on everything they had learned in the course in terms of the readings and writing assignments that we did in order to chart how their thinking about education had changed as the course progressed.

Two students submitted essays that went beyond my expectations. And I think it is because instead of focusing on the content of the course, these two students turned inward to critically examine how they had changed as individuals – what made the course meaningful for them beyond the material that we studied. One student discovered what he called “the futility of pessimism.” His paper concludes:

Rather than simply analyzing what they had ‘learned’ from readings or what they were or were not contributing to the local community, these students took seriously an investigation of how social forces were shaping them as individuals and considered where that was okay and where they might want to resist such pressure. This involved taking into account their various identities and presenting them explicitly for their audience. Although I had not expected these responses, clearly there was something about the course that made such responses possible, and after I received them, I began to rethink just what that might be. I have since begun to articulate what for me is a feminist pedagogy, one that does not focus specifically on gender equality but continually emphasizes a recognition of one’s position, both in various situations and in one’s writing. I believe this kind of self-inquiry encourages open-mindedness and empathy in students because it helps them see the complex factors that are at work in the decisions that they make; it helps them see the inseparability of inquiry and action.

Enacting Feminism

Recently, I revised my teaching philosophy to include the following:

And yet, it would be unreasonable, I think, to suggest that the interrogation I began last year into the identity of the writer, which led me to value an examination of the various positions that inform my work, did not, in some way, influence the decisions I made in my class: one might be tempted to say that such actions do simply ‘represent’ a priori values. I would argue such an assertion misses the complex reciprocity – what we might think of as co-construction, to borrow a term from discourse analysis – that is at work in constructing meaning and/in identities through thought/reflection and action/performance.

Conclusion: Being Explicit

What connects these two narratives for me – about my academic work and my teaching – is a(n ethical) concern for explicitness, about our goals and investments, about our positions and interests, about who we are and what we do. Are there times when it is appropriate not to be explicit about a feminist agenda, when the risks outweigh the possibilities of working ‘under the radar?’ I think so. In the case of my classroom, I think it makes more sense for me to be open with my students at appropriate moments about my feminist values, which they may or may not connect to the way I conduct my classroom. It makes less sense to me to announce the fact that I’ll be conducting a feminist classroom because this risks alienating students who might otherwise welcome my approach – an approach that encourages them to be open the next time they run into someone who identifies as feminist (or any other marginalized identity, if it so happens they arrived in my class with negative preconceptions) and therefore is, in fact, consistent with feminist values.

Where we need more explicitness is in our own scholarship in the academy. Only by attending to our investments can we begin to articulate the meaningfulness of our decisions in our work inside and outside of the academy and perform the kinds of actions that, while they may not be explicitly ‘feminist’ to everyone, nonetheless help create spaces in which feminist thought and action is supported, recognized, and rewarded. Such spaces are entirely necessary for coalition building among, for example, different waves of feminists and feminists of different colours, so that we can come together to address the issues that concern us all. Instead of accepting a question that potentially divides us (are you for or against Hillary Clinton? – i.e. are you for or against women?), we can challenge the question itself.