Negotiating the Geopolitics of Student Resistance in Global Feminisms Classrooms

Abstract

In the spring of 2009, I started my feminist teaching career by designing and offering GWST 340—Global Perspectives on Gender and Women in the Gender and Women’s Studies (GWST) Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). As a teacher simultaneously otherized on multiple fronts of identity and power formations, I encountered challenging incidents of student resistance while offering the course in 2009, 2010, and 2011. This article, by focusing on the geopolitics of student resistance that I experienced in these classes, discusses my pedagogical negotiations with it. In the rest of this introduction, I describe the scarce literature on student resistance to feminist pedagogies and situate my work in dialogue with feminist scholars whose experiential pedagogical pieces have helped me in the design and teaching of GWST 340. Then I provide some background information on the teacher, the course structure, the student composition of the classes, and the institutional site. Finally, I analyze the key components of the course and explore both my pedagogical intentions and the students’ reactions to them. I end the article by offering insights on how to manage and diminish student resistance in global gender studies courses and inviting further knowledge production on the subject matter. Reflecting bell hooks’s conception of teaching as liberatory and transformative, I wanted to create a participatory classroom setting for GWST 340, where knowledges, experiences, and emotions would be provided by both the teacher and the students. This partnership would be fashioned to gain a more in-depth understanding of intermingling imperialist and patriarchal forms and structures of oppression both globally and locally. Such a critical perspective would necessarily center on a critique of U.S. hegemony, which in today’s intensely globalized world implies a substantial scope of economic, political, cultural, and military power. In addition to understanding gendered structures of global domination, which I believed were always already implicated in the local, I also wanted students to develop a sense of women’s agency (especially women living in the so-called Third World who are too often represented as victims in hegemonic Western discourses). Gaining such awareness on women’s initiative and