Why are We Reading Ovid's Handbook on Rape?: Teaching and Learning at a Women's College

by Madeleine Kahn

Why Are We Reading Ovid's Handbook on Rape? raises feminist issues in a way that reminds people why they matter. We eavesdrop on the vivid student characters in their hilarious, frustrating, and thought-provoking efforts to create strong and flexible selves against the background of representations of women in contemporary and classical Western literature. Young women working together in a group make surprising choices about what to learn, and how to go about learning it. Along the way they pose some provocative questions about how well traditional education serves women. Equally engaging is Kahn's own journey as she confronts questions that are fundamental to women, to teachers, to students and to parents: Why do we read? What can we teach? and What does gender have to do with it?

Genres: Nonfiction

198 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2005

Reviews

[Drianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. Now, this book was published in 2005, but the students Kahn populates the book with did not seem to be from the 2000s, but from at least a decade earlier (or more*). I attended a women's college (part of a larger university, though) from 1996-2000, taking literature courses, and I really didn't recognize myself or my classmates at *all* in her depictions of her students. One of her main teaching techniques is apparently to offer no opinions of her own (?) in class, but since I was looking to find some suggestions for how to put in place a feminist pedagogy while teaching Classics (Ovid, specifically, as in the title) and women's literature in general, I felt a little unsatisfied by the book (not her fault, my expectations, I suppose). I neither recognized her students and their concerns from my own school days or from my students (who are secondary level, not tertiary) now, and so it was less helpful to me to hear their voices (mediated through Kahn's ficitonalizing, though, and really, her depictions of the women strained my belief in their representativeness way past breaking) than I found Kahn's own thoughts (I simply wished she had offered more of those and less aporia, although the latter is probably more honest). What of the question "Is forcing students to use analytical reasoning and close reading an inherently masculin(iz)e(d) skill? Is it reifying the patriarchy?" What of hierarchies in the classroom? The most lefty bleeding hearts of us can't object too strongly to hierarchical dynamics or you'd never be able to work in a public school (at the end of the day, no matter how I destabilize my classroom with non-row seating arrangements or try to make students partners in the learning process or take their emotional needs into account--all of which I do!--teaching in a public high school is a perfect example of power dynamics at work. I share power with the students because I HAVE the power to share). She offers no real conclusions and precious little advice (again, what I wanted was not her project). How do I get my students (of all genders) to use their voice authentically in the classroom? Kahn's students apparently did nothing but, so no help there.

And the title chapter, in which one student discloses her own rape to explain her protest against reading Ovid's Metamorphoses offered nothing beyond the insight that Kahn thinks she has only ever had that one student (she returns in later chapters to always be the "rape survivor" character, whom all the other students turn and stare at (!!!!) whenever rape is mentioned, always thinking of her emotional needs blah blah says Kahn) who had experienced sexual assault. And I'll tell you, that's sure not the statistic we were given even when I started college in '96. EVERY classroom will have multiple students (and not just women, either, in the co-ed classroom) who have experienced sexual assault before college is over. Why SHOULD they read Ovid? I never got a sense of Kahn's real answer (perhaps "because they can talk about it in class").

But hey, I definitely think some of the 18th-c. British novels she wrote about sound fascinating, so a few new things for the reading list!

*Her college-aged students (incl. some returning students?) were relitigating the porn wars as though they were a current debate, not a matter of history?, and in fact claimed never to have seen porn? Perhaps I just poorly remember the late 90s, but I certainly remember seeing the porn wars as a thing from the 80s (whose issues I still cared about, but did not think were current).