Speculative Bill

Abstract

This essay discusses some difficulties of teaching Renaissance engagements with race, class, and gender in diverse twenty-first-century classrooms and looks to contemporary romance—science fiction and fantasy—for examples of humane and reparative pedagogy. Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist revisioning of her Earthsea trilogy in the late story “Dragonfly” both models the humility required to make change and stages a teaching practice that welcomes the disruptive and uncomfortable questions posed by a university’s first female student.