#314b

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“Why does every female genius have to die insane and alone?” writes one student in my class in response to the story of Judith Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Woolf famously tells the story of Judith, William Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister whose attempts to duplicate her brother’s career end with her suicide, to make the point that social and educational inequities would have prevented even a woman as talented as Shakespeare from finding success as a Renaissance writer. This is an essential point to make, but as my student’s response emphasizes, women’s doomed and helpless fate under social oppression is a story that high-culture literature tells repeatedly.

It is also a story that can, as romance writer Jennifer Crusie observes, be profoundly alienating to women. In her former career as a Ph.D. student, Crusie writes, “I had to read Madame Bovary, I had to read Anna Karenina, I had to read ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ I had to read Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Lawrence. I had to see Hester Prynne as the great American heroine who triumphs by remaining celibate for the rest of her endless life.” While in the middle of this mandatory curriculum of stories of disastrous female sexuality, Crusie, looking for examples of women’s narratives, begins reading romances:

‘For the first time, I was reading fiction about women who had sex and then didn’t eat arsenic or throw themselves under trains or swim out to the embrace of the sea, women who won on their own terms (and those terms were pretty varied) and still got the guy in the end without having to apologize or explain that they were still emancipated even though they were forming permanent pair bonds, women who moved through a world of frustration and detail and small pleasures and large friendships, a world I had authority in.’

For Crusie, romance is not utopian fantasy. It describes a world more familiar and real to her than the world of the academic literary canon, in which sex condemns a woman to an early death (often at her own hand), and marriage means slavery. In the world of romance, the autonomous woman need not “die insane and alone.” She can live on and have a successful relationship that assists rather than thwarts her self-realization—which, after all, is something that many women actually do.

-Julie M. Dugger, “I’m a Feminist, But…” Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom in Journal of Popular Romance Studies

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Association of American Colleges, “The Challenge of Connecting Learning” (1991)

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Perhaps the first step in making room for students to read pleasurably as well as critically is to acknowledge that all interpretive practices have strengths and weaknesses, and academic reading is no exception. Literary critical reading has its own limits, its own professional turf to defend, and its own forms of sexism. It can benefit students in any academic class on feminist literary studies to be aware of work like Johnson’s: studies that draw attention to the ways male scholars have elevated themselves above other men by comparing those men’s reading practices to women’s. This is not to say that the texts and practices privileged by scholarship are all bad, but that they are part of the same patriarchal culture that pleasurable romance reading is a part of, and susceptible to the many of the same defects. Correspondingly, just as scholarly reading has its strengths, so too does pleasurable reading. We can encourage multiple modes of approaching a text.

Julie M. Dugger, “I’m a Feminist, But…” Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom

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“No poet worth salt writes out of anything other than those various entities she or he defines as self. How aware I am of those selves, and how much I accept those many parts of me will determine how my living appears within my poetry. How my living becomes available, in its strengths and its weaknesses, through my work, to each one of you.

In other words, time, more than anything else, shows me what I need. I know however, that if I, Audre Lorde, do not define myself, the outer world certainly will, and, as each one of you will discover, probably will define each one of us to our detriment, singly or in groups. So I cannot separate my life and my poetry. I write my living and I live my work. And I find in my life truths which I hope can reach across, bring richness, to other women beyond the differences in our lives, beyond the differences in our loves, beyond the differences in our work. For it is within the sharing of these differences that we find growth. It is within these differences that I find growth, or can, if I am honest enough to speak out of my many selves, my loves, my hates, my mistakes, as well as my strengths. I feel, and stake my life and my living upon it, that we become strong by doing whatever it is we need to be strong for. Solstice. I am constantly defining my selves, for I am, as we all are, made up of so many different parts. But when those selves war within me, I am immobilized, and when they move in harmony, or allowance, I am enriched, made strong. Yet I know there are Black women who do not use my work in their classes because I am a lesbian. There are lesbians who cannot hear me nor my work because I have two children, one of whom is a boy, both of whom I love dearly. There are women, maybe in this room, who cannot deal with me nor my vision because I am Black, and their racism becomes a blindness that separates us. And by us I mean all those who truly believe we can work for a world in which we can all live and define ourselves. And I tell you this. My friends, there will always be someone seeking to use one part of your selves, and at the same time urging you to forget or destroy all of the other selves. And I warn you, this is death. Death to you as a woman, death to you as a poet, death to you as a human being. When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge. Because any ratification from the outside can only augment my self-definition, not provide it. Nobody telling me I am worthy, or that a poem is good, can possibly match that sense within my self of worthiness, or of having done what I set out to do.”

-- Audre Lorde, “Self-Definition and My Poetry,” I Am Your Sister

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The enduring popularity of the romance novel makes it an ideal genre to use in teaching feminist literary theory because it raises two compelling questions. What is the women’s studies critic to do when a genre dominated by women writers and readers appears to conflict with feminist ideals?   And what are teachers to do when that conflict turns up in the classroom:  when students feel a disjunction between their pre-existing reading practices and the critical theories that inform their studies?  The opposition between feminist theory and women’s popular reading practices, in scholarship and in the classroom, is an especially pointed instance of an opposition often expressed in the scholarship of teaching literature more generally. This article examines the conflict between popular and critical literary reading practices.   It then focuses specifically on romance by outlining feminist critical arguments both for and against romance reading.  Finally, it recommends that we acknowledge these two areas of dissonance (the conflict students may feel as they straddle different reading practices, and the complicated relationship between feminism and the romance genre), and suggests strategies for making them an analytical focus in class.

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First the disclaimers. I don’t by any means wish to devalue academic literary reading practices, on which I have built a career. Nor do I wish to deny the misogynistic elements in romance fiction, or that some romances and romance subgenres are particularly ugly in this regard. I acknowledge the existence of very, very badly written romance novels, and I don’t believe that the distinction between high- and low-culture literature is entirely based on sexism (although I have been persuaded that it is partly so). I am willing to accept that there may be readers, some of them maybe even students in my classes, who consume romance for the self-defeating purposes that Radway describes. But I also believe, strongly, that most of my students are savvier than that—particularly those who are already fluent, or aspiring toward fluency, in the feminist critical convictions that inspire scholars like Radway and Goodwin. And while some of them may be unable to reconcile loving both romance and feminist criticism, others may find that they can—even if sometimes they feel (understandably) that these two loves conflict. Further, years of discussions with students about their reading have convinced me that English teachers owe a debt to popular fiction genres, including romance, for their entry-level recruiting: for providing easy-to-read texts that capitalize on the lure of popular typologies, books that help readers develop the fluencies that allow them to approach other books. If I believe we should criticize romances, I also think we should be grateful to them. And for all that we see—accurately—as wrong in the romance, we should also suppose—humbly—that some of its appeal might be in its rightness. If we believe in the capacity of our students to distinguish between goods and evils, then we should open ourselves to appreciating the books that they appreciate—and assist them in turning an eye on their appreciation that is both critical and open-minded. As we do this, it cannot hurt to remember how often love is a positive force in human endeavor, whether it be romantic love for other people, or readerly love for the stories they tell.

Julie M. Dugger, “I’m a Feminist, But…” Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom

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For the -------- Workshop, I want to begin designing a unit on AIDS literature and film, which I will teach as part of a new course in LGBTQ life writing. This course introduces students to strategies that queer artists have used to connect personal experiences to communal histories, as they link autobiographical reflection to political projects of protest, coalition-building, and public mourning. Though I am still in the early stages of designing the syllabus, some prospective texts for the course include Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “La Prieta,” Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. Prospective films include Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, Richard Fung’s In My Mother’s Place, and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman. This cross-listed English/WGS course will be taught in Fall 2018 as part of UT’s E314 suite. E314 courses are small, themed seminars of no more than 20 students, which are designed to introduce prospective students to the major or to fulfill a general education requirement for non-majors.

I have already begun incorporating inclusive pedagogical practices into the six courses I have taught in women’s, LGBTQ, and African American literature at UT, especially in the realm of assignment design. In my Fall 2016 women’s lit course, for example, students created a portfolio of five “Interpretive Mode” assignments in lieu of writing traditional literary analysis papers. One of these assignments was to create a class zine inspired by Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a novel whose trans lesbian protagionst, Maria, uses zines to explore her identity and her place within a larger queer community. In creating their zine pages, students drew on passages from the novel as well as secondary sources like Emi Koyama’s “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-V, and Twitter debates between transfeminists and trans-exclusionary radical feminists. This assignment helped students develop a richer vocabulary for discussing trans identities and a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary landscape of trans politics. They also practiced modes of collaborative creation developed within feminist zine communities, developing a project that emerged out of—and was thus responsive to—the values of the cultures they were studying.

For the Mellon workshop, I want to design an assignment that will help students engage with primary source materials in a more immersive, interactive way. When I first taught 1980s-90s AIDS lit and film in my Rhetoric of LGBTQ Politics course, I required students to write an essay analyzing a cultural artifact from this period. This assignment produced somewhat flat readings of the period, as the detached form of the analytical essay did not encourage students to delve deeper into the creative, resourceful ways in which queer activists responded to the crisis. Furthermore, while I showed them material from the rich archives of this period in class, such as the ACT-UP Oral History Project and the Visual AIDS Project, I did not integrate those resources into the assignment itself as effectively as I could have. In designing this new unit, I want to think about how I can get students to explore for themselves new forms of grassroots protest, activist art, and queer kinship that emerged during this period.

I have discovered that most of my students—even those who identify as LGBTQ—have little understanding of the devastation AIDS wrought within queer communities in the 1980s-90s, or of the fact that the disease continues to disproportionately affect communities of color in the United States today. This problem is not limited to the history of AIDS, either. Queer cultures are rarely taught as part of a standard high school curriculum, which means that there are few institutional mechanisms for transmitting knowledge about earlier LGBTQ cultures to a younger generation. I am eager for the opportunity to connect with teachers of minority literatures who are grappling with similar challenges, and to explore how the principles of inclusive pedagogy can help me design assignments that will help students forge meaningful connections between queer histories and their lived experiences.

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MOMOLAND ~ "BAAM" (Tropical House Remix) Areia Remix #314B M/V