I re-start my story (where I start most of them): in a classroom, in the recent past. In Fall 2013, I offer (as I have many times) an introductory course at Bryn Mawr College called “Critical Feminist Studies.”“Critical Feminist Studies” (a course offered at Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2013). This is an English class that focuses on questions of representation, and queries what it might mean to “unbind” feminism from what Wendy Brown calls “the big bang theory of social change.” We follow Brown and other poststructuralist feminists in locating the “conditions of gender” not somewhere “outside,” where we can seize and eliminate them, but rather internally, in “deep processes of identifications and repudations only intermittently knowable…even less often graspable.”Wendy Brown, “Feminism Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 115. This re-conception—which also seems to me ecological, insofar as it acknowledges the permeability of self and environment—shifts our paradigms for transformation, not only theoretically, but experientially. Among us.
Among the twenty-five students enrolled is a queer woman from Texas who writes, early on,
I honestly grew up in a box. It was a box with walls of expectations. I was never comfortable in that box. Yet it was not until I was old enough to think for and make significant decisions by myself that I began to question and tear apart my box. I wish I had begun this process earlier because I know now how much of an impact those walls had on me as a person. Our childhood molds us, but it does not make us who we are.“Breaking Down Boxes,” September 7, 2013 (3:51 p.m.).
As we transition into the second half of the semester, the syllabus shifts from “engendering ourselves” to “engendering our institutions,” and the student re-directs her focus from her own emerging identity to that of the college:
…there are many cases where Bryn Mawr with its “progressive” and “open-mindedness” has stifled the cultural identities of students… . The student body at Bryn Mawr has become a close-minded place, focused on the advancement of certain cultural identities. Bryn Mawr like any other cultural hub has norms: white, queer, upper middle class, atheist, liberal, etc. If one does not conform to these norms, they are looked down upon, there exists societal pressure to conform to the cultural identity of Bryn Mawr… . Bryn Mawr is above all else a sisterhood, a home, a community, and we must foster this sense of togetherness, by coming together and not isolating and discrimination against the variety of cultural identities which exist on our campus.“Web event #2: Bryn Mawr: Community? Empowered? Sisterhood?” November 14, 2013 (11:56 a.m.).
She closes the semester with a prediction of individual change that will have implications for the college:
I will never hide behind the expectations of others again… . I take from this class a greater understanding of myself…accepting, and being proud of who I am… . This semester I unbound myself…just as the flowers use the wire as vines to grow up, I am going to use the bounds that once held me to blossom.“Unbinding Myself to Blossom,” December 19, 2013 (5:50 a.m.).
Two semesters later, the student and her roommate, who is from Georgia, hang a rainbow flag out of one of their dorm windows. They also display a Confederate flag, first in the hallway and then—after dorm residents and deans seek its removal—from their second window. They also lay some duct tape, which they label “Mason-Dixon Line,” in the passageway leading to their room.
Multiple dialogues—as well as lots of protesting, and lots of posturing—ensue. The media—first local, then national—picks up this story.”Students Rally After Confederate Flag Display,” NBC10, Philadelphia, PA (September 19, 2014); Dave Huber, “Confederate Flag at Bryn Mawr College Dorm Causes Uproar,” The College Fix (October 5, 2014); Susan Snyder, “Confederate Flag in Dorm Roils Bryn Mawr Campus,” Philadelphia Inquirer (October 6, 2014); Katilin Mulhere, “A Flag and Race at Bryn Mawr,” Inside Higher Ed (October 6, 2014); Andy Thomason, “Confederate Flag Raises Controversy at Bryn Mawr College,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 6, 2014); Steven Conn, “Callous or Callow: Waving the Confederate Flag at Bryn Mawr College,” The Huffington Post (October 7, 2014); Eric Owens, “Tolerance and Diversity Cause FREAKOUT Over Confederate Flag at Fancypants Women’s College,” The Daily Caller (October 6, 2014); Nicole Lopez et. al, “Petitioning Bryn Mawr College” (October 8, 2014).
Sara Ahmed writes, “The media is crucial…as the interface between an organization and its publics.”Ahmed, On Being Included, 143.
Much of what happens is the result of this interface, the ways in which what is (not only) “outside” drives what is (not only) “inside” the campus. We can’t clearly demarcate what we say from what is being said about us; it isn’t possible for those of us who live and work here to speak to one another in ways not framed by media coverage. Many students record their experiences digitally; inside and outside are increasingly, visibly, permeable.
How to make sense of these many narratives being generated, off-campus, on, and in-between?
What do they call for, by way of response, continued dialogue and learning? And what are the sites where such conversations might be most productive?
An unlikely space for any sort of important-or-productive speaking is the monthly Bryn Mawr faculty meeting. And yet, in mid-September, as the president is describing various interventions—she proposes, for instance, that we devote one day during the spring semester to “campus professional development”—I find myself on my feet, trying to puzzle through, in public, some of my most pressing questions. In the company of more than a hundred colleagues, I ask how much power I-and-we have to direct the course of action here:
I was raised in the rural South, and have long quipped that the longest trip I ever took was crossing the Mason-Dixon line.
This week I have been thinking that I hadn’t gone far enough.
Several of the student leaders are in my classes, and I have been spending lots of time, in class and outside, dealing with what has happened here. Colleagues and I have been talking about our role as faculty, thinking together about curricular changes that might address some of the gaps in our students’ education, how we might have failed to teach them…
But this morning I learned that one of the students who displayed the flag had taken my introductory course in Critical Feminist Studies. I spent this afternoon re-reading her papers, and I began to see how the ideas of identity, intersectionality, representation, and signifying, which I had been talking about in that class, might have been taken up very differently than I intended; the uptake was quite other than what I meant.
And so—as we plan these educational interventions, and I am all for them—I also want to add a note of humility: we do not know how our students will make use of what we give them. The gap between intention and uptake can be huge—as they struggle to make sense of their identities…and as we struggle to make sense of ours.
I am interested in how we might carry this idea forward institutionally, in how to incorporate such awareness into the structures in which we teach. The wise advice of the educational theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth, regarding the unpredictable “uptake” of our “teaching positions,” is not to try and control the responses they evoke, but rather to activate, explore, even celebrate the multiple subject positions that are called into play in such pedagogical exchange. It is an ongoing challenge for me to join Ellsworth in embracing varied uptakes—which then can, perhaps, be revised—as diversity, unruliness, and fertility enter (and leave!) the classroom, in the guise of hunger, desire, fear, “ignor-ance.”Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).