I-Woman

Feminism and friendship? Inseparable — aren’t they?! I know I shy away from placing labels and definitions on things – this stems from a too-polite cautiousness that serves as both a blessing and a curse – but I think my aversion to commitment also comes from years of experience in watching claims debunked (and learning to be the one to attempt some debunking of my own). I’d like to say I have something valuable to say on the topic of feminism and friendship, after all: “I’m a woman! I have friends!” but I never feel like much of an expert, though sometimes my voice sounds so assured while giving advice, I start to believe my own words. What I can say: I’ve often felt that the friendships most worth having are the ones where the person is careful with me. Now, I don’t mean they tiptoe around me, or tell me what I want to hear. By “careful” I think I literally mean “full of care” – people who consider the words they use, the things they do, and the ways in which their actions affect others. People who weigh both their own motives and the motives of others, give generous room for trial and error, and nurture differences of opinion. If I were to try my definition of friendship out as a model for “my kind” of feminist pedagogy, how would it hold up? Do I want a model of feminism that is willing to be care-full with me? Do I want one that cares about me? Or do I want one that gets shit done? Do I want a feminism that is wiser, and more militant, braver and more intelligent than I am? What would it look like? If my feminism were a friend, what kind of friend would it be? Because so much of what I know about being a woman, being a friend, being a feminist, and being a professional, comes from my friends, I guess a more on-topic question might be, if my feminism were a teacher, what kind of teacher would it be?  Sarah and I have been reading a lot of Nina Baym and Flannery O’Connor lately, so right now theirs are often the words that echo in my mind. Cautioning against the tendency in some feminist teaching to privilege specific interpretations – that is, interpretations that are drawn from or provide support for the teacher’s specific kind of feminism, itself a kind of masculine privileging (it creates a line between a right or a wrong reading) -Baym offers the notion of feminist pedagogy as the strength to welcome multiple interpretations. For Baym, what seems like the knee-jerk tendency of a lot of feminist pedagogy (and Sarah and I have come across articles that show us this tendency still in action today) is for a feminist teacher to re-imagine and “restructure their classroom so that power is less concentrated in the figure of the teacher” in order to “counteract the inadvertent effects of her expectations” (253). In response to this philosophy, Baym argues (and I’m quoting her at length here because this is an important moment): “insofar as power is the energy and control that get things done, it is not only an ineluctable dimension of any situation, it is something that feminists require. I take it that whenever there is teaching, there is a power relationship, the question is what is produced by and through that relation. Equalization of power is not to be achieved except by equalization of knowledge, which is not to be arrived at except by the teacher’s effective transmitting of knowledge to the student” (253). I want to qualify “transmitting of knowledge” as “teaching critical reading and thinking,” but I think the force of her idea is clear. For her part, Flannery O’Connor hasn’t told me about feminist pedagogy, specifically, but she does set ground rules for education. Lamenting what she considers the dilution of literary content in high school classrooms, O’Connor suggests that it is the teacher’s responsibility to “[furnish] the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present” (140). The teacher’s responsibility is not to pander to their students’ preferences or to teach lessons on politics, history, or culture. Instead, it is up to the teacher to give the student the tools they need to understand literature. “And if the student finds that this is not to his taste?” she remarks, “Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed” (140). O’Connor’s counter-intuitive claim that the student’s preferences should be left unheard, and her arguably uncritical notion of  “forming” taste – old fashioned, loaded, and problematic as it is – still holds some potential for critical reflection. It seems O’Connor and Baym are actually allied in positioning the teacher as one who has both valuable knowledge (skills) to share, and a responsibility to share it. Unwilling to define feminism as a mode of pedagogy that throws its power away simply (or not-so-simply) because others have been unable to wield it responsibly, Baym reminds us that “Equalization of power is not to be achieved except by equalization of knowledge.” O’Connor might agree on this point. My relationship with power is one I am nurturing, and have been nurturing, for some time. Echoing in my brain with Baym and O’Connor are the words Spiderman’s uncle forces out (I’m sure he’s not the first to say it, but he’s the one who really brought it home for me) as he lay dying. He looks into Tobey Maguire’s eyes (wait, I mean Peter Parker’s eyes) and he reminds Peter/Spiderman/Tobey that “with great power comes great responsibility. ” Well, here’s the thing: I want that responsibility. Why spend all this time learning how to communicate with others if I will have nothing to share or show for it? If I am to take responsibility (in every sense of the word) and do something productive with it, then I need the power to do so (even if the something that comes out of it is small and intangible as a new line of thinking or an opportunity for thought that comes up later, or the ability to reconsider the way a sentence is put together). I’ve seen good teachers at work, and I have seen the power that comes with critical thinking, or simply (or not-so-simply) being told enough times - and it only has to really click once - that you have both the right and the responsibility to question those with power… whether they are teachers, politicians, strangers… or your best friends. The ability to ask questions is a kind of power in itself. It is a skill, a lesson, and a tool. At the very least, it is a step. So, meandering around the topic, I come back to Baym, who reminds me (and any teacher who might take this for granted) that “‘reading like a feminist woman,’ is an acquired skill even for women” (249). I would like to add that teaching like a feminist woman, being a feminist woman, and being a friend (feminist or otherwise), are also acquired skills. And like Baym’s call for (what I take to be) bravery in the face of multiple interpretations in the classroom, I hope I can have (and learn to have) what it takes not to be threatened by multiple interpretations of woman, teacher, or friend. Fortunately for me, I have brave, generous teachers who allow me to interpret each of these roles it in my own way every single day — mistakes, misreadings, and obscure pleasures included. I want the power. I want the responsibility. I want to remember to be care-full with it…. (Excerpts are from Baym, Nina. “The Feminist Teacher of Literature: Feminist or Teacher?” (1988) and Flannery O’Connor Mystery and Manners.)

“Regrets collect like old friends/here to relive your darkest moments/I can see no way/I can see no way…” I can remember when I first started collecting regrets in journals.  I thought that if I hid them there and then hid them all inside a box that it would be the ultimate form of denial, but the best part would be to take them all out again and console them (you’re still useful to me!) and name them and count them: all the hurts concealed but still there for my pleasure and perusal.  The dark, nameless thing.  The unavoidable but still accessible abyss of feeling (there’s no other way to put it than in those melancholy terms, even though the phrase reminds me of girls with blue hair and too much eyeliner) I felt those years.  If I could hide them but still see them, they’d still be real.  They would have happened—would be still happening. I learn by sight and not by faith—I was always told to learn the opposite way.  I will always be a visual learner; visually taught, visually learned. Case in point: I still remember when I understood what Bergson’s theory of durée meant to me.  I was watching Virginia Woolf drown on a big screen when the scene cut to Mrs. Dalloway stepping out to buy the flowers herself.  I understood, suddenly, what it meant for time to be layered over itself in fine sheets of paper, for you to always be turning the corner holding flowers for me on that spring day.  Or maybe it wasn’t spring, but it felt like spring in Alabama: sunshine and camellias and I thought my heart would burst with love for you and the foreshadowing sadness of it all.  I won’t forget; I haven’t forgotten.  In fact, I keep trying to explain these moments to willing listeners (always vaguely, of course), and they almost always understand what I’m trying to say but never my urgency. “I’ve been a fool and I’ve been blind/I can never leave the past behind/I can see no way/I can see no way…” I think Feminism involves, for me, a sense of urgency.  Maybe that’s what it is about it that’s so relatable to me,—and, let’s face it—so emotionally binding.  I’m transitioning poorly.  I can only ever talk about my own feelings.  But! to connect them to the wealth of feeling that springs from all the other strong women, past and present, to look down the well, to write on the body, to say fuck you! to those who won’t view it.  Those are the moments of contention that excite me.  I am scared of telling a student to watch his mouth around me (and others in an academic sphere) because I want to be liked and receive positive evaluations.  I would rather uphold the status quo than be the object of derision, cast off for being a prude or upholding a sense of decorum (the 18th century would have loved me; I would have made the perfect Clarissa—so virtuously rebellious!).   What is I-woman in our culture?  Is she de rigueur, or rigorous?  At what point does she march up to the attic, confront the box and either love and accept it or light that motherfucker on fire?  The wedding dress, the jealousy, the yellow wallpaper: who will keep me quiet?  What apathy, what middle-class standard of living can silence me? Flannery O’Connor kept the peacocks not out of obligation but because they impressed her.  They multiplied, became a metaphor.  They ate the roses; toppled the fences.  They had no other purpose than to represent inanely ludicrous beauty.  Sometimes to recognize that (and not kill it) is to live with it, to rock along peacefully acknowledging that this is what you have chosen: you will have the life, the baby, the husband, but also the career, the drive, the motivation.  You will not walk into the water like Virginia Woolf; will not be relegated to the attic like Bertha; will not swim out to sea like Edna Pontellier. You consider these things because they are Romantic, but never because they are an option.  You love to buy the flowers yourself, the feel of expensive paper, the weight of his big hand in yours.  You will ignore the box until you make a decision, and you will be okay with that.  The books call, the Southern mocking bird makes strange, grotesque (hey, Flannery!) noises outside your window, but you won’t dissect them for students.  You’ll let the students listen for themselves, decide for themselves, think for themselves.  And in the mean time, you’ll shake it all out the way you were meant to. “and it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back/so shake him off/oh woah”

“There lay the apple, the dark, warm fruit that - familiar and yet transformed, like a good friend back from a journey - now awaited me. It was the journey through the dark land of the oven’s heat, from which it had extracted the aromas of all the things the day held in store for me. So it was not surprising that, whenever I warmed my hands on its shining cheeks, I would always hesitate to bite in. I sensed that the fugitive knowledge conveyed in its smell could all too easily escape me on the way to my tongue. That knowledge which sometimes was so heartening that it stayed to comfort me on my trek to school. Of course, no sooner had I arrived than, at the touch of my bench, all the weariness that at first seemed dispelled returned with a vengeance. And with this wish: to be able to sleep my fill. I must have made that wish a thousand times, and later it actually came true. But it was a long time before I recognized its fulfillment in the fact that all my cherished hopes for a position and proper livelihood had been in vain.” Walter Benjamin, “Winter Morning,” from Berlin Childhood Since 1900.