Abstract
We are proposing a new paradigm for feminist educators by reevaluating the significance and application of identity theory in feminist pedagogy. Specifically, we formulate a new theoretical approach that actively deploys a post-positivist realist1 position on identity and experience in the feminist classroom. Up until now, feminist pedagogy has utilized identity categories mainly as explanatory claims about how oppression works in the world, but not as a way of revolutionizing the methodologies of feminist teaching. We propose that by mobilizing the theoretical and pedagogical application of realist identity theory feminist educators can activate the explanatory power of identity—specifically the way that identity categories refer outward to and produce knowledge about our shared social world. Moreover, our approach provides a coherent theoretical framework for the classroom that avoids the essentialist tendency to overlook the dual status of cultural identities as both real and constructed. At the theoretical level, feminist educators have taken seriously the constructed nature of social identities; still much of feminist teaching continues to operate on the unspoken essentialist assumption that identities are stable, homogeneous and deterministic. We assert that feminist educators can organize teaching practices that democratize and enhance the production of liberatory knowledge by engaging the realist view that identities are politically and epistemically significant, while also being variable, nonessential and radically historical (Moya 2000).
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Sánchez-Casal, S., Macdonald, A.A. (2002). Introduction. In: Macdonald, A.A., Sánchez-Casal, S. (eds) Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms. Comparative Feminist Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107250_1
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