Gaining our Sea Legs

I was really fascinated tonight with the notion that our class found Luce Irigaray “easier.” What might that mean?

In brief passing, we offered several theories:

1) She does a better job of setting off Freud’s discourse from her own discourse (and in truth, that wasn’t so hard, given some of the differences she wishes to expose);

2) Some of y/our experiences resonated more closely with those she was writing about (that is, this text speaks to us in ways that other texts we have read did not);

3) That we have done the hard work of understanding deconstruction as a methodology, post-structuralism as a way of reading and doing scholarship, and have reached the point where it comes easier.

I would, of course, like to think that all three are in play.

How do we come to mis/recognize ourselves in a text? What does a text “mis/represent” for us as readers? Why was it so much easier for us, tonight, at least in the groups I sat in with, to talk about our everyday lives--our struggles to date, to parent, to justify our reproductive and romantic decisions before our friends, our employers and our in-laws?

Could a text written by a man (please read: one who identifies or is identified as a man) have as easily evoked such discussions? How much of what happened in class tonight is attributable to what we have done together? How much to what Irigaray has done?? How much of it is attributable to the fact that Irigaray is a woman??? 

I’m painfully aware the Irigaray is the only female on our course syllabus. There are no persons of color. (Though is Derrida, an Algerian-born Jew, “white”? I’d be happy to discuss that with anyone who would care to listen.) Does Irigaray “mis/represent” gender issues for our class, in our readings, in the ways in which we have ended up dividing our discussions? 

Why couldn’t we have gotten there through Lacan’s Queen in The Purloined Letter? 

Paradoxically, perhaps, I want to argue that traditional notions of gender matter, and there is something important to preserve in the distinction. (I know some--many--will disagree.)

As I noted to some folks tonight, I have staked my identity as a teacher educator on upholding the “feminine  notion” of  caring as central to the work of the classroom teacher. Here, I have been deeply influenced by scholars such as Nel Noddings and Madeleine Grumet (my favorite education writers, along with Maxine Green). 

Grumet famously interpreted Horace Mann’s desire to hire “caring female teachers” at the crossroad of adjacent gender projects. As a member of the upwardly mobile professional class, she thought Mann’s desire for female teachers was his attempt to re-claim something lost from his own past (a healthy relationship to women, to “feminine values”). The young women who came to work in Mann’s schools, on the other hand, Grumet speculates were seeking to escape invisible domestic servitude. They sought masculine power.

The Common School is a product of competing gender reclamation projects, coming together just long enough to sustain something new. 

Could something similar have been operating in our class tonight? I wonder . . .