So, last summer I attempted (quite unsuccessfully) to write and submit an article about “feeling trouble not troubled in the classroom.” While I generated some useful ideas, I never converted them into an academic article. Why not? I’m sure it had something to do with my need to prep two classes while watching/hanging out with my two kids (who were 5 and 8 at the time). And I know that it had a lot to do with my growing resistance to academic writing. It’s difficult, and frequently not in ways that push me to engage more deeply and meaningful with ideas or authors or experiences.
Now it’s a year later and I’m trying again. I’m still resistant to writing in ways that I don’t want to, but I also recognize the value of sustained, deliberate, and laborious attention to working with and through what it might mean to feel trouble in the classroom. As a result, I’m trying to craft a very brief abstract today to submit for a call for papers on queering academic spaces.
I’m amazed at my resistance to this activity. I know that I’ve taught, thought about and practiced a queering pedagogy that fits with the themes of the edited collection that I want to be included in. Yet, I’m doing everything I can to avoid writing the abstract. Like tweeting:
Why is that I frequently only want to tweet when I NEED to be writing something for a deadline?
Or posting on facebook (which, BTW, I almost never do):
Or, writing this blog post. Why such resistance? Perhaps even the fact that I want to pose this question and then engage with it is an effort to procrastinate?
Or is it? The theme of my proposed essay is “feeling trouble in the classroom.” It’s all about creating spaces within (and outside of) the classroom for feeling (addressing, processing, struggling with )the trouble that engaging with queer ideas/concepts/authors engenders. In “Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy is a Queer Thing,” Suzanne Luhmann writes:
As an alternative to the worry over strategies for effective knowledge transmission that reduce knowledge to mere information and students to rational but passive beings untroubled by the material studied, pedagogy might be posed as a question (as opposed to the answer) of knowledge: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students (7)?
She continues by offering these questions:
How does the reader insert herself into the text? What kind of identifications are at stake in this process? What structures these identifications? How do identifications become possible, what prevents them, and ultimately, makes learning (im)possible? (7)
In my own pedagogical practices (inside the classroom and online–course blogs and this trouble blog), I strive to create spaces where readers/class members, myself included, can explore/work through/engage with what knowledge does to us. This is true in all of my classes, but especially the three undergraduate queer courses that I’ve taught: queering theory, fall 2009; queering desire, fall 2010; queering theory, fall 2011. In each of those classes, I experimented with online and offline ways in which to articulate, share and process our feelings (resistance, confusion, excitement, wonder, anger, uncertainty) about the ideas that we encountered.
Could my resistance to writing about queering pedagogy be about more than mere procrastination? Yes. Do I have time to reflect on why I resist? No.
As I (try) to work on my abstract, here are the posts that I’m drawing on:
Feeling Trouble and Troubled in the Classroom, part ONE, part TWO, part THREE
On Monday, I wrote about Barbara Kruger and included one of her images, NO. At the end of that post, I added in my own image response. I did it really quickly (and, as it turns out, sloppily) with Pixelmator. Earlier today, I decided to try again, using some newly acquired, yet still rudimentary, skills. Here’s my new version of YES:
This afternoon, I picked up a book on Barbara Kruger, an artist that I wrote about in a blog post earlier this week, from the local library. It’s awesome! (Thanks AMP for suggesting that I look at her stuff). As I was watching women’s volleyball on the Olympics, I found this image, a magazine cover she did in 1992:
It’s from 1992 and all about family values rhetoric. Cool. I don’t have time to read the Newsweek article right now, so I’m just posting it here, along with a few other links I found related to this image:
The following is part one of my series on family values from my feminist debates class.
THE CLASS: CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DEBATES (GWSS 3004)
First, a little background. Since I came to the U of M in the fall of 2006, I’ve taught a course on contemporary feminist debates five times. Each time I taught it, I aimed to trouble students’ assumptions about what was at stake with some popular feminist issues, such as: reproductive rights, equality in the workplace, and family-as-patriarchal-institution. I chose readings that complicated their ideas about debate as being for or against an issue (as in the case of pro-choice/pro-life) and worked to get them to recognize what J Butler describes as the “irrepressible complexity” of who and what feminism is.
For our unit on feminist family values, I selected readings that went beyond the typical “mommy wars” debate (between career and stay-at-home moms) and the rejection of the Family as an oppressive, patriarchal institution to explore how our understanding of the family in the early 21st century is dominated by the family values rhetoric of the Christian right. We traced the history of “family values” rhetoric and then explored ways to rethink and reclaim feminist (and queer) families and values. As I taught the course, my readings and topics for this section evolved with my increased interest in queer feminism.
The essays that we read for this unitare all responding to a particular moment within American popular/political culture when rhetoric about family values was frequently used to critique feminism and to position feminists as against the family and family values. See my timeline for some general dates related to our discussion.
One oft-cited example of connecting the promotion of family values with the critiquing of feminism is Pat Robertson’s remarks in a 1992 letter opposing Iowa’s equal rights initiative*:
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
*Note: When I originally posted this entry earlier today, I indicated that the Robertson quotation came from the 1992 Republic Convention. After further research, I determined that this was not the case (see here for more information).
Another notable (and perhaps the most popular) example of connecting feminism/feminist goals with the erosion of the family and its values is Dan Quayle’s (in)famous comments about the fictional character, Murphy Brown in May of 1992:
It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another `lifestyle choice’. I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it’s time to make the discussion public.
— Vice President Dan Quayle addressing the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and criticizing Murphy Brown’s decision to be a single (highly successful) mother, 5/19/92.
[Note: I created an in-class exercise with these above quotations in which students spent about 5-10 minutes free-writing some responses to my questions about them: Is feminism necessarily counter to family values? To morality? Is it possible to redefine the family and family values? If so, how?
Important to note is that Quayle’s comments on Murphy Brown are part of a larger speech in which he claims that one of the primary causes of the LA riots (which happened in the summer of 1992 right after the police who beat Rodney King were found not guilty) is the erosion of traditional family values. (As I will discuss later, discussions of the erosion of family and family values by the right is frequently linked to racist rhetoric and the demonizing/pathologizing of black mothers and families). Here is a transcript of the entire speech and a news clip with an excerpt from the speech:
As an aside: Did you watch the entire clip? What do you make of the juxtaposition, by the newscasters, of the clip about Dan Quayle and his description of Murphy Brown as mocking the importance of fathers with the clip about Robert Reed (Mr. Brady) and the revelation that he had died of AIDS and not cancer? Is this merely coincidence that one clip leads to the next? Or, is some connection being encouraged in the viewer?
It would seem that for both Robertson and Quayle, feminism poses a serious threat to the family and its values about “right and wrong”? But, why is feminism such a threat? Why does feminists’ desire to work for an equal rights amendment (Robertson) or a feminist’s choice to be an unwed mother (Quayle) elicit such extreme responses? What anxieties/fears about white masculinity do these feminists claims tap into (see Chloe’s post for more on this)?
In her essay, “It’s All in the Family,” Patricia Hill Collins focuses her attention on “the family” part of family values by exploring “how six dimensions of the traditional family ideal construct intersections of gender, race, and nation (63) and produce/reinforce gender/race/nation hierarchies. She argues that it is crucial for organizations –feminist or Black Nationalist, for example–to be critically aware how they use/invoke ‘family.’ For more on this article, check out my chart and notes for it.
In their various contributions to the Feminist Family Values Forum, Lloyd, Jimenez, Steinem and Davis focus much of their attention on the “values” part of family values. Indeed, the purpose of the forum was to bring a wide range of women together to talk about what values actually mean and what values feminists want to embrace and promote. See some of my notes for these readings (along with readings by M Pardo and V Lehr).
In bringing all of these readings together, I want us to be curious about:
What are families? What are their values?
Is feminism bad for families and their values?
What sort of values do feminists promote?
What does it mean to value something?
Why is language about values (and morality) so exclusively linked with one particular vision/version of the family?
What differences do you see between the phrases “family values” and “families values”?
WHAT IS THE FAMILY IN “FAMILY VALUES”? Drawing upon the readings from the past two weeks, our discussions (in class and on the blogs), and your own observations, write down some thoughts on these different aspects of the “family.”
PATRIARCHAL WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS CAPITALIST HETEROSEXUAL NUCLEAR “NATURAL”
My 6 year old daughter Rosie created and posted the above sign on our door a few weeks ago. It’s in opposition to the proposed Minnesota Marriage amendment. Rosie passionately believes that you should be able to mary [sic] who you want. Yep, she’s awesome.
Yesterday, as I was looking through various sources on virtue ethics, I came across a book that I checked out of the U of Minnesota library years ago: Bill Bennet’s The Book of Virtues. In fact, I checked this book out around the same time that I started this blog. I know this because I remember checking it out as I was reading and writing about Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice.
Since first mentioning this book on my blog, I’ve thought about creating some sort of response and/or alternative to Bennet’s call for and list of virtues. My own children’s book of virtues? A critical essay dissecting the problems with Bennet’s approach? An edited collection with essays on various feminist (and queer) virtues? Yep. I’ve tentatively (and rather vaguely) imagined all of these approaches. But, since I’ve been too busy teaching and researching and writing other things (and trying to raise two young kids while struggling to cope with my mom’s diagnosis and then death from pancreatic cancer), I haven’t had enough time to follow through on any of these (rather ambitious) plans. Instead, over the past three years, I’ve sprinkled in random musing about these virtues into my blog posts. Note: I hope to cull this blog sometime soon and collect many of those musings. I’ve also made family values, which Bennet uses The Book of Virtues to promote, a frequent teaching topic for one of the classes that I’ve taught many times for the U of M Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department.
Inspired by my revisiting of Bennet’s introduction to the book, this week I’m working on collecting and archiving some of my past class summaries from my lecture notes, handouts and course blogs on family values in my feminist debates course. As I’ve mentioned in other blog posts, I’m in the process of migrating my material from my U of M blogs and archiving my teaching resources. I hope to post them in a ridiculously long blog entry by the end of the week.
For now, I want to offer up a question that makes me curious. In the introduction, Bennett argues that his book is a “‘how to’ book for moral literacy” that can provide kids with valuable resources for how to develop a moral/good/admirable character. His vision of moral literacy includes the following character traits:
Self-Discipline
Compassion
Responsibility
Friendship
Work
Courage
Perseverance
Honesty
Loyalty
Faith
Question: What traits do you think are necessary for moral literacy?
