Abstract
As our teaching contexts change, so does our pedagogy. What may be acceptable feminist reading of texts, topics, and issues in one geographical/regional/national context, may not be how we teach in other places and spaces. Students come with their learning, and as teachers when we meet those internalized notions in a classroom, we alter our ways of knowing so that both students and teachers find the space to hear each other, even to honor each other’s learning. It is a delicate dance. To facilitate new forms of learning and teaching, the exchange happens in nuanced ways so that neither the learner nor the teacher is negated. Teaching gender in varied contexts like southwest and south Asia, an academic confronts her own habits of learning. Negotiating time and space, she/I learned that stretching or contracting the limits of the ‘acceptable’ is a challenge that is layered by her own subjectivities and those of her/my students.
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Notes
- 1.
The term subjectivities is used here as a discursive production (subject of the discourse and produced by the discourse); as a (un)consciousness of ‘who I am/who we are’ of cultural identities. Author acknowledges the simplification of this loaded term for the purpose of contextualization and clarification.
- 2.
Southwest Asia is a geographically specific term to indicate a portion of Western Asia that lies at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula. West Asia/Southwest Asia are preferred terms to Middle East and Near East, both of which are Eurocentric, indicating their geographical location ‘east’ of Europe. In class I have often queried students, “middle of what, and east of where”; the subsequent conversation turns to history of colonialism and ascriptive identities.
- 3.
South Asians in southwest Asia are placed quite low in the (un)official ‘racial’ stratification. (Largely based on nationality, race is a poorly examined concept and reality in the area).
- 4.
Term is used specifically to describe young women who cut their hair short, walk with a particular gait that is not feminine; the word is boy with the ‘at’ indicating a plural in the local language.
- 5.
I was no stranger to operating as an outsider or interloper; as a woman of color in the American academy, I was always aware of my positionality ascribed to me.
- 6.
The public universities across India are under the oversight of a centralized governmental body, University Grants Commission. It had instituted women’s studies centers throughout the hundreds of universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These centers grew organically, or not, over the decades.
- 7.
Acknowledging simplification again, colonial experiences habituate the colonized into adapting to colonialism. Decolonization of the imagination and hence behavior comes over time when freedom is internalized.
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Grewal, J. (2016). Teaching Gender in Other Classrooms: A View from the Outside. In: Haltinner, K., Pilgeram, R. (eds) Teaching Gender and Sex in Contemporary America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30364-2_25
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