Teaching Women with a Y-Chromosome: Do Men Make Better Feminists?

by Wade Edwards


In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks is both welcoming and suspicious of those who would teach from a position that recognizes the limitations of personal experience. Teaching from experience, as we know, can lead to a difficult and defensive essentialism that relegates students and teachers alike to categories and "types," and, as hooks argues, can obscure real cultural understanding of privilege and oppression, neither of which respects clear-cut boundaries of skin color or gender. If only a black woman professor can teach black feminism and racism, if only Jews can write about Jewish suffering, categories such as "black," "feminist," "racist," and "Jewish" cannot help but assume a monolithic hegemony that places an undue burden and an undue power on the teacher in the classroom. Since no black feminist could possibly speak for all black feminists, since no Jew can speak for all Jews, the aspiration to move away from teaching-one's-experience would reject "conventional oppressive hierarchies," and would represent for hooks a step in the right direction—a step toward pedagogical tolerance and diversity first made possible by the work of feminist critics, activists, and teachers (77–78).