Critical Feminist Pedagogy

 Similar to the paradoxical framework, critical feminist pedagogy endorses a nonlinear and contradictory logic. In a review of the development of critical feminist pedagogy scholarship, Lather (1998) underscores its commitment to social justice. Emerging in the 1980s and grounded in the scholarship of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, and Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy is an ensem-ble of practices, which nurtures contradictory voices, counternarratives, and competing understandings. Moving away from the “humanist attachments to a dialectic of truth” and toward “contributing to struggles for social justice” (Lather, 1998, p. 497), Lather advocates against developing a universalizing pedagogy grounded in the rhetoric of “salvation” (of the powerless by those with social power), and instead favors openness, passage, and nonmastery. A feminist approach to critical pedagogy must recognize how narratives of sal-vation enforce privilege and how pretensions of “emancipating” or “empow-ering” a less privileged “Other” have become a habitual discourse and common practice in feminism. Drawing our attention to problematic routines in feminist postcolonial critique, Spivak (2012) asserts that the capacity to unveil those “habits” and to expose domination within critical thought pro-vides the infrastructure for critical pedagogy. Spivak’s critique is twofold: first, critical feminist scholarship points to how the postcolonial “Other” seeks to recover a subject position by turning to hegemonic scripts and discourses (Spivak, 1988). Second, in addition to the problematic cooptation into hegemonic scripts, the postcolonial “Other” is not a homogeneous constituency. It is divided between elite, and more privileged “Other,” on the one hand, and the subaltern on the other. Subalternity, accord-ing to Spivak, is not just a general term or a synonym of any “Other” lower class group, but an “Other” that is to be removed from all lines of social - mobility (Spivak, 2005), including having no capacity to “speak” for oneself or to use knowledge (thought, reasoning, and language) that is not Western or hegemonic, in order to be “heard.” Further drawing on these ideas, Ellsworth (1989) maintains that key assumptions, and pedagogical practices, such as “empowerment,” “student voice,” and “dialogue,” perpetuate relations of domination. She emphasizes that through putting prescriptions concerning empowerment into practice, “we produced results that were not only unhelp-ful, but actually exacerbated the very conditions we were trying to work against, including Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, classism . . .” (p. 298) Hence, critical feminist pedagogy requires a theory and practice that allows the subaltern to cease being an object of benevolence in human rights discourse, as well as to cease being the target of empowerment efforts by those who are more privileged. Asking what kinds of practices may encour-age and train ethical imagination of women on both sides of this power divi-sion (Morton 2011), our article traces experiences of ruptures, failures, and breaks as sites of learning (Ellsworth, 1997; Lather, 1998).