The women’s studies classroom: freedoms and constraints
The women’s studies classroom by itself may not be a reassuring one; in fact it can be as alienating as any mainstream classroom, especially for students from marginalized backgrounds. Feminist texts and discourses can be daunting, and distanced from one’s life. For students from regional language background, the English itself becomes a barrier. A subversive reading in the curriculum—Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, for instance—may in fact emerge as an unsurmountable obstacle for many students. The text questions the biological foundations of normative gender identities and allows us to think of gender as performative; it is the very act of performing gender that constitutes who we are, there is no stable or biological gender prior to this. Butler troubles the “givenness” of gender by bringing out its constructed, coerced and performative nature and thus her texts have the potential to lead to a sense of freedom and excitement in those not completely at home in the gendered regimes that we inhabit. However, texts like Butler’s may just as easily have the opposite effect—generate dread and incomprehension in a student, and a sense of not quite belonging in the class. No text is inherently radical. It needs to be mediated and related to the lived realities—linguistic, regional and community contexts of students—for it to be meaningful and emancipatory. If this does not happen, the women’s studies classroom may end up reinforcing the pre-existing socio-cultural and linguistic hierarchies.
Framing success/failure
In this piece, I will spend some time reflecting over the nature of the mediation by a teacher in the women’s studies pedagogic space. This mediation cannot be reduced to simplification of texts and concepts that are meant to challenge the apparent simplicity/naturalness of the world around us. I remain wary of teaching approaches that introduce all texts and ideas in frameworks of either the agency or victimization of women. The current media brouhaha over Indra Nooyi’s biography My LIfe in Full is a case in point but one also witnesses the readiness with which such figures are often adopted as role models in mainstream women’s studies discourse. This is not to say that such life stories are to be ignored, they can be important reading. But a story like Nooyi’s cannot be read simply as a “success story”; the media columns do enough of that. It is necessary to locate it within the structures of caste/class that facilitated the narrator’s gendered and spatial mobility, notwithstanding the familial and racial biases she faced. Representing it solely as the success of a “woman of color” in a white, male-dominated corporate world is not merely reductive but may in fact prove disheartening for other women from the third world settings, signalling that the failure to overcome debilitating inequalities is a “lack” within themselves.
Conversations across disciplines
Let me now reflect on my continuing struggle to mentor students, in ways that are not simply about examinations, assignments and research. Women’s studies, as an interdisciplinary subject, coupled with the institutional assumption that students should be exposed to some form of “gender sensitization,” is offered at various levels in the university where I teach. While I draw mainly from my experience of teaching students at the masters’ and doctoral levels in gender studies, I am heartened by the unexpected connections made with students from a range of disciplines. Sometimes students from mathematics might opt for an elective course on gender studies over electronics simply because they think it is a soft option, and would not add much to their already impossible workload. Every once in a while, happily for me, the subject ends up being not so trivial for some of these students! I steer them to think about the invisibility of women at the top levels of science; do they ever wonder about it? As students of mathematics, does the #MeToo movement hold any significance for them? It has been extremely important for me to communicate to students from the sciences that I value having them in the class, and in turn, they tentatively voice issues and questions that they would otherwise relegate to the background as “waste of valuable academic time.” Feminist mentoring allows students to relate the classroom to their lives and contexts; and find ways of navigating those psychological pressures which go unrecognized in academia, especially in the sciences.
Beyond traditional mentoring
At what point does teaching/supervising become mentoring? If we discount the most insipid, disinterested and exam-driven instruction, most teachers do mentor their students to some degree or the other, by nurturing academic interests and professional aspirations. But traditional mentoring is implicated in the power imbalances between the teacher and the student. A mentor-mentee structure is rarely devoid of hierarchy, even when it enhances the knowledge and professional prospects of the mentee. As McGuire and Reger (2003) point out: “The traditional mentor relationship is a hierarchical one in which one person serves as a teacher, sage, and sponsor to another one in order to facilitate the other’s professional and career goals” (56). This is not always a bad bargain, and many of us will agree to have gained intellectually and materially by associating with a traditional scholar-mentor. But “traditional mentoring is not equally accessible to all groups within academia, and members of dominant groups (i.e., white, male, heterosexual) receive more benefits from traditional mentoring relationships than do members of underrepresented groups” (McGuire and Reger 2003, 59). Such a relationship works when there is a match between the mentor and mentee in terms of backgrounds and priorities; but runs the risk of breaking down when there is a yawning gap between a successful, high-achieving mentor and a less privileged student for whom survival in academics is forever imbricated in social and economic vulnerabilities.
Students/researchers from marginalized locations require a kind of mentoring that goes beyond singleminded dedication to academics. This might sound strange if not undesirable to certain established scholar-teachers with an unwavering faith in “merit.” I recall a rant from a well-respected colleague from the sciences: “They [potential research students] look at my CV and they come here to work with me. The School assigns just about anyone to me! I want to tell this guy [the student], look buddy, this is not what I do!” He sounded terribly frustrated with a process that landed him with research students who did not quite match up to the high standard he believed in, notwithstanding their aspiration to work with a dazzling scholar like him. While he vented, he clearly had no curiosity about the experience of a women’s studies colleague like me. One of my students had just submitted her final draft in the midst of battling domestic abuse. In order for the thesis to reach a submissible shape, I read between the lines as much as the lines themselves, trying to make sense in the light of the discussions we had over years. I was tired of doing very basic language correction and proofing over and over again. But I was reluctant to return the draft for protracted corrections as I would have in case of any other student. I realized what she had done was phenomenal in the face of crushing personal obstacles. I also understood the thesis would in all likelihood open up choices for her including a way out of difficult personal circumstances. At a certain point, I asked my other research scholars to pitch in with preparation of the bibliography, formatting and such tasks. They were happy to help notwithstanding their own trying schedules; their feminist training had moulded them as a community of researchers.
Over years, I have learnt that quite a few of my colleagues in the Social Sciences routinely carry out laborious correction of English before they can even begin to engage with the argument of the drafts submitted. Perhaps the larger presence of rural and first generation learners in the Social Sciences prepares us for this. In an increasingly impact-factor driven academia, this investment has no chance of figuring as “academic achievement.” I feel sheepish each year as I fill up the annual report with not much to show! A rueful thought crosses my mind, “Where did all that labour go!”
The personal in academia
Mentoring is more than helping a student submit her thesis or get through examinations. The feminist principle of “The personal is political” helps us to think of mentoring as a way of validating experiences and lives that are mostly invisible in curricula and academic culture. The centrality of “experience” as a category in the feminist discourse questions the hegemonic mind-body dualism in academia. As many feminist scholars have pointed out, “this dualism reinforces the idea that men are ‘naturally’ equipped to be intellectuals and that feminine qualities (in men or women), such as the expression of emotion, caring for others, and attention to relationships impede scholarly activity” (McGuire and Reger 2003, 55, Jaggar 1989, 145).
Revisiting my own experience as a doctoral student, I remember feeling diminished by my motherhood responsibilities and would look at the impressive reading lists of my fellow research scholars, especially that of my male batchmates, with some envy. I worked late into the night after my toddler slept, and snatched moments here and there during the day, literally “from the jaws of time” as a woman friend put it. Yet this was never enough and I was forever underslept, exhausted and guilt-ridden because I felt my research was not good enough (and it probably wasn’t!). What kept me going? My advisor, a known feminist scholar, demanded rigour but communicated that her expectations stemmed from a certain faith in my abilities. She also nurtured a warm connection with my daughter and me. While her expectations were trying, I never felt that my personal life was devalued. I recall an incident from the early days of my doctoral research. I was reading a complex text by the French philosopher Michel Foucault with my advisor and kept seeking explanation literally after every sentence! I had hastily looked over the piece just the night before, despite having had two weeks’ notice to go through it. Frustrated, she said, “Don’t expect me to spoon feed!” I was shamefaced and would have liked the painful session to end, but responded with some hesitation, “Just spoon feed the first ten pages and then I will read the rest.” No more was said about this and we continued reading the text. This memory brings a smile to my face because six months before the submission of my thesis, I could read complex theoretical texts with speed and without too much anxiety. To this date, I attempt to teach a difficult text by situating it in the experiences of students, like my mentor did decades back. I believe that I survived the demands of my Ph.D. at a difficult juncture in my life because I shared a space of equality and frankness with my advisor.
Nurturing-Mentoring
Mentoring carries the responsibility of enabling someone to move out of debilitating circumstances; it is much more than the term that has emerged as a catchphrase in an NGO-ized women’s studies discourse—“capacity building.” I will draw from the qualitative study conducted by Gail A. Okawa to substantiate this point. As part of this study, Okawa (2002) interviewed Geneva Smitherman, Distinguished Professor, and director of the African American Language and Literacy Program at Michigan State University. For Smitherman, mentoring was an “inheritance.” Her father brought up her and her siblings “under the great hardship of being Black and poor in America.” He was the one who instilled a faith in her abilities inspite of the white, Eurocentric school system. He pushed her to become the spelling bee champ of her school and excel in everything including extracurricular activities. He helped her with the homework in elementary school up until the eighth or ninth grade. Smitherman’s father remained a model for her through her own course of mentoring students of color: high expectations combined with attention to “the intellectual, social, developmental, and other needs of the mentee—helping the whole person to the extent possible” (Okawa 2002, 512).
I believe this precisely points to the labour as well as the gains of engaged, nurturing forms of mentoring. As Okawa puts it: “The mentor sets standards of achievement and excellence for mentees as well as motivates them to stay on task so they can complete the journey. On occasion, this might mean nagging and butt-kickin (especially when/if the mentee starts half-steppin—which is normal, but it has to be overcome). Finally, mentoring is a kind of nurturing whereby the mentor helps/ motivates the mentee to construct a vision of possibilities beyond the present moment” (Okawa 2002, 512). In such a framework of mentoring, a teacher-mentor ensures that a mentee from a disadvantaged background learns to deal with an intellectual culture that can be deeply alienating in terms of its language, practice and protocol, without succumbing to a sense of non-belonging. But this calls for sustained academic and emotional labour on part of the mentor. It is easier said than done.
Mentoring: failures, disillusions, and small rewards
I look at the whiteboard in my room, it is a bit like a palimpsest with submission deadlines for my research scholars—written, erased, struck through, and rewritten. The overshooting of academic deadlines is sometimes owing to slackness but there are often other deeper reasons. With fewer scholarships available, many students juggle between a job and research. This is not unusual, teachers like me will recall having done this during our student days. But a shrinking job market, increased stress on “merit” (defined by social and cultural capital) and pre-submission publication requirements add to the anxiety of young researchers today. Some advisors may publish with their students, and their credentials and familiarity with the world of academic publishing might be of help. The advisor’s name generally figures as first author even in cases where the article draws substantively on the student’s research, field data and academic labour. However there is a heartening trend—a relatively smaller section of senior scholars co-publish with students while choosing to be second author notwithstanding their significant contribution in shaping the theoretical frame and other aspects. As a colleague put it, “She needs it more than I do.”
The home and the class: women’s studies in online mode
The pandemic and the resultant shift to online mode of teaching has brought new challenges to those of us who teach gender in a graduate or post graduate classrooms to students in their early twenties. The line between the home and the outside (the classroom, the university campus, the hostel, a different city) is blurred in the online pedagogic context. A feminist text deepens the chasm between the emancipatory aspirations of young students and the patriarchal site of the home with expectations of gender appropriate, heteronormative behaviour. This sometimes results in severe turmoil and mental health crisis in a student located in the familial space, ironically stemming from the transformative potential of the subject being taught online. As campuses remained closed, women students spoke of being pressurized to get married since they were “sitting at home” anyways. As a teacher I can only listen, trying to provide a space that they do not find at home. I try to communicate that feminist resilience often means simply holding on. I feel grateful when some student assignments relate such dilemmas to the texts discussed in class, even though our pedagogic engagement is only on a distanced, digitized medium.
Mentoring and goal-driven women’s studies: A difficult balance
It is necessary to look at the disciplinary context of women’s studies, beyond the individual ability or failure of a teacher to be an empathetic mentor. Located on the margins of mainstream academia, and bogged down by the struggle for ever-diminishing funding, women’s studies carries the burden of justifying its very existence. A teacher gets caught in endless cycle of projects, extension activities, gender training and mainstreaming programmes and so on. Feminist mentoring on the other hand is a slow job, and a mentor/advisor needs to push beyond the given meanings of mainstream/governance feminism, if she were to relate to the lives and aspirations of students from heterogeneous contexts. However, especially in the current scenario of a market driven knowledge economy, one constantly faces the pressure to make women’s studies “relevant”—without disturbing the status quo. An uncritical alignment with state-centred/global development discourses and NGO-ized welfare models—boosted by the objectives of enhancing employability or vocationalization of students—constitutes the dominant mode of women’s studies today.
As Mohanty (2013) argues, alongside increased privatization and commodification of higher education “[r]adical theory can in fact become a commodity to be consumed; no longer seen as a product of activist scholarship or connected to emancipatory knowledge, it can circulate as a sign of prestige in an elitist, neoliberal landscape”(971). Further, “Knowledge projects are detached from their historical and local moorings and reattached to the global market as “this place” becomes “every other place” and this subject becomes “every other subject” (Mohanty 2013, 972), . If mentoring is about validating the personal and historical locations of students, especially of those from marginalized contexts, such a pedagogic approach can be deeply alienating.
As a faculty member with a permanent position in a central university, I have relatively more freedom to design my courses and not completely succumb to a goal/skill-driven idea of women’s studies pedagogy. But even in the worst possible scenario, I believe that feminist mentoring will continue to find relevance, perhaps now more than before. In a market-driven neoliberal university, students from marginalized backgrounds will need a validation of the self more than ever, to be able to negotiate new forms of exclusion. Feminist ideas have unexpected and transformative possibilities, even when “contained” within outcome based syllabuses and institutional straightjackets. I am sure I and many other teachers like me will continue to search for ways to make feminist and enabling connections with our students, inside the classroom and outside.
References
Jaggar, Alison M. 1989. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” Inquiry 32 (2): 145 quoted in McGuire and Reger 2003, 55.
McGuire, Gail M., and Jo Reger. 2003. “Feminist Co-Mentoring: A Model of Academic Professional Development.” NWSA Journal 15 (1): 54–72.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2013. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 967–91.
Okawa, Gail.Y. 2002. “Diving for Pearls: Mentoring as Cultural and Activist Practice among Academics of Color.” College Composition and Communication 53 (3): 507–32.
Deepa Sreenivas teaches at the Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Social Sciences, at the University of Hyderabad. Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of Confluence, its editorial board or the Academy.
This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”.