Current mood:	feminist, creative
Current music:	Gotan Project

Lucky Week Thirteen: I Am Virtual, Hear Me Roar
A Classroom Memory

When discussing a text, one of my students responds…and the only word I hear coming out of his mouth is “femi-Nazi.” I must have given myself whiplash as I turned to him, and some kind of bracing emotion shot through his facial muscles. “What is a femi-Nazi?” I asked him.

“Uh, I just mean, like, a crazy feminist who hates men.”

“What is a Nazi?”  

“I’m sorry, Ms. Platt.”

“I didn’t ask for an apology. Tell me what Nazis are and what Nazis do.”

“…”

I’ll spare you, dear reader, any more of this exchange. Ah, feminism…the word is both savior and scourge.

The Feminine Mystique, Classroom Edition

I agree with most of our class that "feminist pedagogy" describes pedagogy that de-centers an authority figure, that makes the instructor a fellow learner, that fosters collaboration. But after looking at Erin's post, I find myself with the same kinds of questions that she does: what makes this pedagogy distinctly "feminist" and not critical or post-colonial or anything else? The word "feminist" certainly has its share of negative connotations, as I show above, and I can hardly blame anyone wanting to distance themselves from the term. I, too, felt that pressure as a young teenager--before I understood what feminism really was, I avoided the term because I immediatelly associated it with "man-hater."

Such ignorance!

I don't want to be an essentialist, but sometimes, as a poet, clinging to essence is all I've got...My friends: we must put the "fem" back in feminism. Feminist pedagogy can be about empowerment with a special focus on making classrooms safe and nurturing for women.

Yeah, I said it. And our creative writing classrooms are sorely in need of it.

All Classrooms Are Not Created Equal

Can there be a classroom more insidious than a creative writing classroom? Competition exists amongst composition students, surely. But emotional stakes in comp classroooms are relatively lower. Most students don't choose to take composition. Since writing is a severely devalued skill, any particular faculty with it isn't likely to get you far socially, at least in a first-year comp class. In fact, it may get you ostracized, and many students feel the need to hide the fact that they're good writers. Now, a creative writing classroom on the other hand...

I can't speak for everyone in every CW classroom. But I think I have some reason to say these things. Everyone in a creative writing classroom wants to be the best. Even those who claim not to care tend to hide their ambition and jealousy. Oh, yes, and then there was Robert's comment in class that low-res MFA programs are no fun because you don't get to make people cry in workshop. [Yet, we're taught that creativity is something that must be nurtured, that creativity comes from the right brain, the play side, the ludic side. The female side. Ah, feminist pedagogy, can you help us transform this belief? Romanticism is not dead. It is undead.]

Working with both male and female creative writing teachers, with both male and female creative writing students over the (it seems) many, many years I've been doing my creative work in academic environments, I strongly believe that nowhere in the English field does a woman have to fight harder to be taken seriously than in a creative writing classroom. I think it's because the field is considered "soft" and women writers (poets in particular, maybe) are under even greater pressure to prove their intellectual prowess. Males in the field are, because of their maleness, automatically considered more cerebral and intellectual; thus, their poetry, good or bad, is assumed to be inherently more studied and worldly. Okay, I'm going out on a limb here. But I've seen it happen. And I've had to defend my lyric, nonlinear poetry with everything I have in me to male colleagues and teachers, sometimes even to female colleagues and teachers. This in a class supposedly focused around student writing, around writing as a process, around expression!

And then, there were the days when all the guys were absent from the CW classes, and it was just us women poets and our female instructor. You could feel the energy in the room change. It looked as though all of us were trying to supress sighs of relief. The class became about collaboration, about nurturing. I don't mean to say that female teachers are inherently better for female creative writing students, and I've learned a lot from some of my male teachers and colleagues. But there have been some seriously oppressive atmospheres lurking in some of the classes I've been in, with lots of male students and male teachers throwing their weight around.

This has been my experience and I can't argue with it. It's a very, very vulnerable place, more vulnerable than anyone might think. I can't believe I'm saying this, but sometimes I think that some CW classes should be women-only. I've often thought that the women in our MFA program should get together somewhere and share our writing and our experiences in a safe haven. Could cyberspace make this possible? After reading the "Lesbian Lives on the Line" piece, I'm not so sure, but I do have faith. Maybe I will start up a group online. Maybe I will start it next semester.

I understand other oppressed peoples through the lens of my own oppression.

(What the heck am I even talking about? I must be tired. Stick a fork in this blog, because it's done.)