Feminist Pedagogy

The essay about feminist pedagogy reminded me of the essay we had to read that mentioned womens' versus men's writing processes. I think that the feminist perspective, like the cultural perspective, is something that the reader of any text needs to keep in mind. It is important to realize what the context of a piece of writing is. In terms of composition, it is interesting to see what forces influence our writing. For example, it took me a while to realize that my writing was extremly passive and unassertive and that I hardly ever took a firm stance on anything. This was partially because no one thought to point out to me that that was a problem. Not that "female writing" is necessarily problematic. Just for me, personally, I had to find a way to be more assertive in my writing. This eventually led to me learning how to come and say something outright instead of dancing around the subject-- and made my papers tend to run even shorter.

A lot of the time, I'm not sure what to think about feminism, and I'm not sure that drawing attention to the differences between males and females is necessarily all that, for lack of a better term, progressive. In fact, I thought it was interesting that Jarrat pointed out how having a male teacher teaching feminist literature sometimes makes it better, because the teacher cannot be accused of being biased. No matter what we do, I think the dichotomy between masculine and feminine is so engrained in us that we will continue to consciously as well as unconsciously label things that way. Just using the term "feminist pedagogy" implies that there is something "other" or opposite to be studied.

So, if feminist pedagogy is simply a call to include more women writers and influences in the curriculum, then I'm all for it. But if it's struggling to become its own branch of composition, or indicates a different attitude altogether, like the assertive writing style I was talking about earlier, then I don't know how I feel about that. Maybe I just don't like sterotyping "passive" as "feminine" and "asserive" as "masculine."