Reading This Bridge Called My Back for pedagogies of coalition, remediation, and a razor’s edge

Abstract

In this article, I examine the engagement of pre-service teachers with US feminist of color theory. Centering coalition relations, re-mediation, and dialogic narrative, I argue that the field of women of color thought is pedagogical in thinking through the intersectional and multidimensional problems of teaching and schooling, particularly when working with under-resourced schools and displaced and dispossessed students and their families. A framework based on the intellectual labor of US women of color, where the pedagogies of coalition, re-mediation, and dialogic narratives create powerful epistemological interventions that support pre-service teachers as they think about the complex problems of schools in this era of the defunding and the dismantlement of public education. It is a US women of color pedagogy that engages teachers in developing alternative accounts of their relationship to the world, how these new accounts are unavoidably theoretical and provide a starting point for new thinking about pedagogy, power, and praxis.

Keywords:

• U.S. feminist of color theory
• feminist pedagogies
• coalition
• remediation
• pre-service teachers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 Laura Perez (1999) argues that women of color feminist practices emerge during the mid-1960s to the present. See also Rachel Lee’s 2010 article ‘Notes From the Non-Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color.’

2 Gloria Anzaldua, from her essay ‘La Prieta’ in Bridge, p. 209, where she begins her articulation of El Mundo Zurdo, the left-handed world, a vision of the movement of coalitional feminism.

3 Lugones (1987) centers Audre Lorde in her thinking about difference within coalitional politics, where Lorde’s concern about the homogenization in coalition formation helps build the argument for a politics that centers non-dominant difference.

4 I do not mean that all narratives have equal footing in this cognitive space, or that all voices are heard. Some narratives are more powerful than others and if in this cognitive world of stories and ideologies (because these too are grand narratives), alternative explanations are subsumed, a narrator may not be able to access the positioning for another understanding of experience.

5 Mohanty’s foundational thesis cites the work of Naomi Scheman’s 1980 Anger and the Politics of Naming and her 1983 article Individualism and the Objects of Psychology, where much of her theorizing begins in the consciousness raising sessions of the women’s movement.

6 See Lugones (2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a COR Special Research Grant from the University of California.

Notes on contributors

Cindy Cruz

Cindy Cruz is an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Her research interests are with queer street youth, urban ethnography, youth and violence, and decolonizing pedagogies. In particular, she is pursuing research that centers the thinking of feminists of color.