Constructing Gender Pedagogies: Desire and Resistance in the "Alternative" Classroom

Abstract

Traditional approaches to teaching about gender examine the politics of oppression and marginalization of women, and less frequently question the profound implications of the construction of gender binaries itself. This essay examines emergent meanings in students' (focus group) conversation about the alternative curriculum of a course entitled “Gender, Culture and Communication”. Three questions or concerns are central to this study, and are informed by a Foucauldian as well as a social constructionist framework. From a Foucauldian standpoint we look at desire and resistance as the terms are both present and invisible in the students' self reflections and their reflections about the course, and how those conversations might invoke tensions between the institutional and the material, disciplinary and social boundaries. From a social constructionist standpoint, we look for the stories students tell about gender as they emerge in interaction-in the focus group discussion about the class. Our final question asks whether there can indeed be an alternative curriculum in a course, or within a discipline that holds gender relations as its core set of relationships. In other words, can we ever be outside of the relations described by gender discourse?

Keywords:

• Gender
• Identity
• Resistance
• Desire
• Power
• Knowledge
• Critical Pedagogy
• Social Construction