Feminist Teacher
Abstracts for 14.3

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“White Girl Watching: Reading Eye to Eye”

By Gail B. Griffin

This essay investigates the racial politics of the gaze involved in the interaction of white female student readers and texts by African American women writers. Specifically, it examines two classroom scenes. In the first, a class of white women struggle with the dynamics of "identification" and the politics of "watching" in the course of reading Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a text directed explicitly toward a white female readership. In the second, a white student's resistance to Phillis Wheatley's Christian reading of her own experience of transportation and slavery comes to exemplify the politics of the racially privileged gaze. The essay argues that the reading encounter, like other human encounters across lines of race, demands both white self-consciousness and a radical de-stabilizing of whiteness as a category.

“Teaching about Interlocking Oppressions: The Case of HIV and Women”

By Donna A. Champeau and Susan M. Shaw

(No abstract available.)      

“Identities of Race, Class, and Gender Inside and Outside the Math Classroom: A Girls' Math Club as Hybrid Possibility”

By Stephanie Jones

(No abstract available.)

“Marketing and Teaching a Women's Literature Course to Culturally Conservative Students”

By Karen Dodwell

Teaching a literature by women course in a culturally conservative college in which many students are suspicious of feminism involves not only a strategy for creating successful classroom activities, but also a strategy for marketing the class to assure that it is a viable class with enough students. The paper suggests that teachers assess the dominant culture and then select appealing centerpiece texts that can serve as the focal point of a marketing strategy. Teachers should set achievable goals and try to foster complex but respectful discussion that challenges comfortable and dogmatic positions.

“Feminist and Queer Values in the Southern Conservative Christian Classroom: The Case of Jane Austin's Emma”

By Mark K. Fulk

(No abstract available.)