Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation)

by bell hooks

Who speaks? Who listens? And why?

Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn—to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world.

one way to build community in the classroom is to recognize the value of each individual voice.

I have found through the years that many of my students who bitch endlessly while they are taking my classes contact me at a later date to talk about how much that experience meant to them,

In my professorial role I had to surrender my need for immediate affirmation of successful teaching (even though some reward is immediate) and accept that students may not appreciate the value of a certain standpoint or process straightaway.

The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk—and ta...

say, I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the discomfort it can cause.

When students complain to the teacher about this lack of inclusion, they are told to make suggestions of material that can be used. This often places an unfair burden on a student. It also makes it seem that it is only important to address a bias if there is someone complaining.

Paulo was one of the thinkers whose work gave me a language.

And you see, even their use of the enough tells us something about the attitude they bring to this question.

And yet, I never wish to see a critique of this blind spot overshadow anyone’s (and feminists’ in particular) capacity to learn from the insights.

But critical interrogation is not the same as dismissal.

my right as a subject in resistance to define my reality.

I like to live, to live my life intensely.

Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement

academic production of feminist theory formulated in hierarchical settings often enables women, particularly white women, with high status and visibility to draw upon the works of feminist scholars who may have less or no status, less or no visibility, without giving recognition to these sources.

the way work is appropriated and the way readers will often attribute ideas to a well-known scholar/feminist thinker, even if that individual has cited in her work that she is building on ideas gleaned from less well-known sources.

any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public.

of what use is feminist theory that literally beats them down, leaves them stumbling bleary-eyed from classroom settings feeling humiliated, feeling as though they could easily be standing in a living room or bedroom somewhere naked with someone who has seduced them or is going to, who also subjects them to a process of interaction that humiliates, that strips them of their sense of value? Clearly, a feminist theory that can do this may function to legitimize Women’s Studies and feminist scholarship in the eyes of the ruling patriarchy, but it undermines and subverts feminist movements. Perhaps it is the existence of this most highly visible feminist theory that compels us to talk about the gap between theory and practice. For it is indeed the purpose of such theory to divide, separate, exclude, keep at a distance. And because this theory continues to be used to silence, censor, and devalue various feminist theoretical voices, we cannot simply ignore it.

Yet, despite its uses as an instrument of domination, it may also contain important ideas, thoughts, visions, that could, if used differently, serve a healing, liberatory function.

have come to see that silence is an act of complicity, one that helps perpetuate the idea that we can engage in revolutionary black liberation and feminist struggle without theory.

By reinforcing the idea that there is a split between theory and practice or by creating such a split, both groups deny the power of liberatory education for critical consciousness, thereby perpetuating conditions that reinforce our collective exploitation and repression.

This process of commodification is disrupted and subverted when as feminist activists we affirm our commitment to a politicized revolutionary feminist movement that has as its central agenda the transformation of society.

There are moments in my life when I feel as though a part of me is missing. There are days when I feel so invisible that I can’t remember what day of the week it is, when I feel so manipulated that I can’t remember my own name, when I feel so lost and angry that I can’t speak a civil word to the people who love me best. These are the times when I catch sight of my reflection in store windows and am surprised to see a whole person looking back … I have to close my eyes at such times and remember myself, draw an internal pattern that is smooth and whole.

It is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location.

Throughout her chapter, whenever she offers an example of individuals who use essentialist standpoints to dominate discussion, to silence others via their invocation of the “authority of experience,” they are members of groups who historically have been and are oppressed and exploited in this society. Fuss does not address how systems of domination already at work in the academy and the classroom silence the voices of individuals from marginalized groups and give space only when on the basis of experience it is demanded. She does not suggest that the very discursive practices that allow for the assertion of the “authority of experience” have already been determined by a politics of race, sex, and class domination.

Fuss does not aggressively suggest that dominant groups—men, white people, heterosexuals—perpetuate essentialism. In her narrative it is always a marginal “other” who is essentialist. Yet the politics of essentialist exclusion as a means of asserting presence, identity, is a cultural practice that does not emerge solely from marginalized groups. And when those groups do employ essentialism as a way to dominate in institutional settings, they are often imitating paradigms for asserting subjectivity that are part of the controlling apparatus in structures of domination.

They do not attend class and say, “I think that I am superior intellectually to my classmates because I am white and male and that my experiences are much more important than any other group’s.” And yet their behavior often announces this way of thinking about identity, essence, subjectivity.

There is rarely any need for marginalized groups to bring this binary opposition into the classroom because it is usually already operating. They may simply use it in the service of their concerns.

As a teacher, I recognize that students from marginalized groups enter classrooms within institutions where their voices have been neither heard nor welcomed, whether these students discuss facts—those which any of us might know—or personal experience. My pedagogy has been shaped to respond to this reality. If I do not wish to see these students use the “authority of experience” as a means of asserting voice, I can circumvent this possible misuse of power by bringing to the classroom pedagogical strategies that affirm their presence, their right to speak, in multiple ways on diverse topics. This pedagogical strategy is rooted in the assumption that we all bring to the classroom experiential knowledge, that this knowledge can indeed enhance our learning experience. If experience is already invoked in the classroom as a way of knowing that coexists in a nonhierarchical way with other ways of knowing, then it lessens the possibility that it can be used to silence.

When I teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in introductory courses on black women writers, I assign students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory. Each person reads that paragraph aloud to the class. Our collective listening to one another affirms the value and uniqueness of each voice. This exercise highlights experience without privileging the voices of students from any particular group. It helps create a communal awareness of the diversity of our experiences and provides a limited sense of the experiences that may inform how we think and what we say. Since this exercise makes the classroom a space where experience is valued, not negated or deemed meaningless, students seem less inclined to make the telling of experience that site where they compete for voice, if indeed such a competition is taking place.

In our classroom, students do not usually feel the need to compete because the concept of a privileged voice of authority is deconstructe...

If a professor’s pedagogy is not liberatory, then students will probably not compete for value and voice in the classroom.

And I am most thrilled when the telling of experience links discussions of facts or more abstract constructs to concrete reality.

Also, I share with the class my conviction that if my knowledge is limited, and if someone else brings a combination of facts and experience, then I humble myself and respectfully learn from those who bring this great gift.

Now I am troubled by the term “authority of experience,” acutely aware of the way it is used to silence and exclude. Yet I want to have a phrase that affirms the specialness of those ways of knowing rooted in experience. I know that experience can be a way to know and can inform how we know what we know. Though opposed to any essentialist practice that constructs identity in a monolithic, exclusionary way, I do not want to relinquish the power of experience as a standpoint on which to base analysis or formulate theory.

To me this privileged standpoint does not emerge from the “authority of experience” but rather from the passion of experience, the passion of remembrance.

Often experience enters the classroom from the location of memory. Usually narratives of experience are told retrospectively.

Then there are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountaintop and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountaintop is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

Importantly, white females were protecting their fragile social positions and power within patriarchal culture by asserting their superiority over black women.

So long as sexual unions with black women and white men took place in a nonlegalized context, within a framework of subjugation, coercion, and degradation, the split between white female’s status as “ladies” and black women’s representation as “whores” could be maintained. Thus to some extent, white women’s class and race privilege was reinforced by the maintenance of a system where black women were the objects of white male sexual subjugation and abuse.

They harbored understandable resentment and repressed rage about racial oppression, but they were particularly aggrieved by the overwhelming absence of sympathy shown by white women in circumstances involving sexual and physical abuse of black women as well as situations where black children were taken away from their enslaved mothers. Again it was within this realm of shared concern (white women knew the horror of sexual and physical abuse as well as the depth of a mother’s attachment to her children) that the majority of white women who might have experienced empathic identification turned their backs on black women’s pain.

Although they have written poignant memoirs which describe affectional bonds between themselves and black female servants, white women often failed to acknowledge that intimacy and care can coexist with domination. It has been difficult for white women who perceive black women servants to be “like one of the family” to understand that the servant might have a completely different understanding of their relationship.

The servant may be ever mindful that no degree of affection or care altered differences in status—or the reality that white women exercised power, whether benevolently or tyrannically.

Again it must be remembered that exploitative situations can also be settings where caring ties emerge even in the face of domination

Until white women can confront their fear and hatred of black women (and vice versa), until we can acknowledge the negative history which shapes and informs our contemporary interaction, there can be no honest, meaningful dialogue between the two groups.

Though the call for sisterhood was often motivated by a sincere longing to transform the present, expressing white female desire to create a new context for bonding, there was no attempt to acknowledge history, or the barriers that might make such bonding difficult, if not impossible.

Content with the appearance of greater receptivity (the production of texts where white women discuss race is given as evidence that there has been a radical shift in direction), white women ignore the relative absence of black women’s voices, either in the construction of new feminist theory or at feminist gatherings.

Withdrawal is not the answer. Even though practically every black woman active in any aspect of feminist movement has a long record of horror stories documenting the insensitivity and racist aggression of individual white women, we can testify as well to those encounters that are positive, that enrich rather than diminish. Granted, such encounters are rare. They tend to take place with white women who are not in positions where they can assert power (which may be why these are seen as exceptional rather than as positive signs indicating the overall potential for growth and change, for greater togetherness). Perhaps we need to examine the degree to which white women (and all women) who assume powerful positions rely on conventional paradigms of domination to reinforce and maintain that power. Talking with black women and women of color I wanted to know what factors distinguish these relationships we have with white feminists which we do not see as exploitative or oppressive. A common response was that these relationships had two important factors: honest confrontation, and dialogue about race, and reciprocal interaction.

that what many white women fear is being unmasked by black women. One white woman, from a working-class background, pointed out that black women servants witnessed the gap between white women’s words and their deeds, saw contradictions and inadequacies. Perhaps contemporary generations of white women who do not have black servants, who never will, have inherited from their female ancestors the fear that black women have the power to see through their disguises, to see the parts of themselves they want no one to see.