It's about time! Repetition, fantasy, and the contours of learning from feminist pedagogy classroom breakdown

Abstract

This paper explores feminist pedagogy classroom conflict through looking at how time, in a psychoanalytic sense, can rupture straightforward interpretations of manifest classroom dynamics. I use the concept of transference to consider how classroom conflict is complicated by the reliving and replaying of past conflicts in the pedagogical arena, a dynamic that is more unwieldy in feminist pedagogies that rely on personal experience and dialogue. Conflicted classroom experience can also reappear and be repeatedly relived in fantasy; I examine how fantasy can work as an ego defence at the same time that it can be a location for learning about the conflict that produced it. Finally, I draw on Freud's concept of deferred action to explore the haunting of difficult classroom experience. My central concerns lie in the difficulties of crafting learning from feminist pedagogy conflict and of arriving at a tolerable afterwards to such conflict.

Keywords:

• feminist pedagogy
• classroom conflict
• transference
• experience
• deferred action
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aparna Mishra‐Tarc and Sara Matthews for feedback on an early draft and for the intellectual community that they provide.

Notes

1. Crisis, in some educational discourses, indicates a state of being epistemologically off‐balance – a moment through which one might perhaps shift perspectives and learn. Crisis, in this view, is often seen as a pre‐condition for learning. Crisis can also be understood as a problem in the classroom, as unhelpful and unhealthy conflict. Classroom crisis and interpersonal conflict can, I believe, extend to a situation I might call classroom breakdown, featuring scenes in which classroom dynamics become stymied, verbally violent, and hurtful. These various meanings of breakdown and crisis, are, of course, connected. Trauma I understand to be an encounter of violence which has a repetitive quality to it, an encounter which the subject re‐lives and re‐animates in her internal world. For this reason, I believe that some classroom encounters can be traumatic for learners and teachers. While trauma is often thought to be experience that resists representation, I also believe that we are always, in some form (often incoherently or affectively), representing our experiences, but that we can never adequately represent our experiences. Trauma is a burdened term, and my use of it in this paper is not meant to negate the suffering of victims of atrocity, but to show how the ordinary suffering that we inflict on each other can also be experienced as traumatic, how feminist pedagogy can become a scene of violence which is relived inside the subject.

2. I acknowledge an intellectual debt in this paper to Deborah Britzman, Shoshana Felman, and Alice Pitt (Britzman 1998, 2003; Felman 1987, 1992; Pitt and Britzman 2003; Pitt 2003). Their work has influenced my thinking profoundly despite the relatively few direct citations in this paper.

3. Introjection, internalisation, and identification are related processes of taking some aspect of the outside world into the ego; they are means by which the self is fashioned. Broadly speaking, through the constant expulsion and incorporation of objects (e.g. ideas, qualities, characters, texts, narratives, fantasies, people) and through our varied emotional ties to objects, a subject constantly makes and re‐makes herself, a process that typically occurs unconsciously. One might internalise a conflicted relationship or might identify with an object (see Laplanche and Pontalis 1973). Identity, as Diana Fuss (1995) puts it, is the history of one's identifications.

4. Disidentification is the term given to a disavowed identification: ‘an identification that has already been made and denied in the unconscious’ (Fuss 1995, 7, citing Butler 1993). In this case, a subject cannot bear to acknowledge that piece of the self that already exists in the unconscious.

5. Idea developed through conversation with Alice Pitt, March 2006.

6. I use reconciliation here to signal some sense of a tolerable afterward.