INTRODUCTION

  Every teacher who has ever walked into a Women's Studies survey class of general studies students has faced resistance. It can be as deceptively mild as the subconscious assumption of privilege that leaves one unable to even conceptualize "oppression," or as unspeakable as "the massacre of fourteen women at the Université de Montréal by a gun-wielding young man who had convinced himself that women, transposed in his own sad head into the phrase 'you bunch of feminists,' were the cause of his own personal misery" (Lewis 167). My purpose in this paper is to suggest that the theories of difference proposed by Marilyn French--in Beyond Power: Women, Men, and Morals--and by Iris Young--in Justice and the Politics of Difference--can be used to create a theoretical framework in which initial resistance can become itself a heuristic tool in the feminist analysis of culture by students who would never have called themselves feminists, nor seen feminist activism as relevant to their own lives. With this strategy, theory and consciousness-raising combine, and students gain skills that will permanently enhance their lives and lead to exciting transformations.  

 Resistance to Women's Studies

I think it is important to consider the chief reasons for the general studies students' resistance to Women's Studies. Some are obvious: unfamiliarity, rumor, societally-encouraged anti-feminist prejudice, and so forth. We read about objections to Women's Studies in the popular press regularly--including those of former Women's Studies supporters--and some students have accepted such negative assessments without much examination.

Still other students enter a Women's Studies class expecting a support group atmosphere where sharing of personal victimization brings catharsis, rather than scholarly examination of cultural conditions. While sharing personal experience can greatly enhance everyone's learning, this limiting expectation may be as great a barrier to optimal learning in Women's Studies as the anti-feminist assumptions of others.

In my experience, though, the major reason novice students resist Women's Studies is simply their inability to accept its fundamental premise: that women are oppressed. Many students have only the most extreme idea of what oppression means--genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the Holocaust--so they cannot reasonably entertain the proposition that women are oppressed. Thus, many believe they have never met an oppressed person, nor have they ever felt oppressed personally, so they wonder why we should waste a semester talking about the oppression of women. In order to "challenge oppression," people must first believe it exists and that it is wrong; further, those people must want to end it.

Other students, those who have experienced oppression first-hand, may accept the fact of oppression, but reject the assertion that the relatively privileged, heterosexual, white women who have been the most visible feminists are oppressed in any way. They may see feminism as an unnecessary distraction from race, class, and sexual orientation issues that already engage their attention. Bell hooks explains, for example, how ambivalently some black women confront feminist analysis:

How do we bring together such widely disparate views? We must begin with definitions and examples that generalize the discussion; only later can we return specifically to the oppression of women. We must ask questions: What is oppression anyway? What does it look like? Where might I find it, if I knew what it was? What can we do about it? And then we must question our answers.

We must involve students in theoretical analysis which leads to change. Bell hooks sounds this call:

Each feminist classroom must be a place where students and teachers join in the critical process of theorizing that hooks envisions. Thus, each of my courses is designed to move students from alienation, to theory, to experience, to activism, in ways which both break down resistance and encourage direct involvement in the task of making the world more livable for everyone.  

  The Call to Participatory Learning

In other words, how do we present theoretical frameworks and expect students to learn how they work without falling into the trap of requiring students to regurgitate the elements we have taught them? How do we move from providing students with answers to questions they know we will ask them on exams to arming students with tools that will allow them to do the work of transformation in the worlds they inhabit?

Too many students enter my classes at a point where they are afraid and unable to question any form of authority, especially that of "the teacher." To expect these students to immediately embrace the analytical tools we would like them to use against their own assumptions is to ignore their "keep in mind who has the gun" socialization.

The student's job, as many have internalized it, is to memorize and regurgitate facts. Relatively few students from privileged backgrounds question this process; they are accepted into the institution, they memorize, they regurgitate, and they receive a diploma which they have been told will usher them into an even higher level of privilege in the culture. For such students, any discussion of oppression threatens not only their preconceptions about what hard work and education will do for them, but also their assumptions that everyone has the same opportunities as they.

Students from marginalized groups, on the other hand, may be acutely aware of the unfairness of the educational system and their traditional exclusion from it, but nevertheless may be heavily invested in "succeeding" on the institution's terms. If they have been taught that higher education, as it stands, is the route out of oppression, they may share the willingness to accept the system without question, despite the fact that a college education no longer truly guarantees even white males success.

I argue that it is our responsibility, in Women's Studies, to offer all students a chance to critically analyze both the traditional system and their roles within it, however difficult that might be. Bell hooks and Ron Scapp recognize that "students who have had a more conventional education would be threatened by and even resist teaching practices which insist students participate in education and not be passive consumers" (Teaching 143-4). Scapp adds,

Thus, it is essential to begin by alerting them, and proving to them, that it is not only allowed in this classroom to challenge and reject unsatisfying theoretical constructs, but that it is their task to do so. We must encourage them to think critically, at all times, even about our own most dearly-held theories, the ones we truly hope they will take to heart. They must see that we are all there--teacher and student alike--to learn together how to do that, as a goal in itself. Students must begin to recognize themselves as part of the theoretical dialectic.

Hooks and Scapp point out further that part of student resistance has nothing to do with Women's Studies, or any particular pedagogy. Hooks asserts that "fundamentally, they don't want to be participants" (146). I think hooks has identified an outcome of our elementary and high school education, as well as our television-centered home lives, that deserves attention. Too many of my students are survivors of a system that taught them to quietly endure. The prize for endurance was the diploma. Hooks identifies the cause of their quiet endurance as "repression" (147):

I would add that some of these students have never so much as conceived of any "dialectical exchange of ideas," anywhere, let alone in a classroom. Every setting in their lives, from television to classroom, has treated them as undiscriminating receptacles rather than as participants. It thus becomes our task to show them that learning can be a life-giving experience which is its own present reward, rather than dogged labor worthy of being undertaken only in order to gain future financial success.

The introduction to my course also stresses that our task together is to move through a series of activities that will help us all to reconceptualize our own social theories, making them ever more intentional. Every reading, every lecture, every discussion, every written assignment is aimed at achieving this goal. If the course "works," each student will become a theorist of the kind hooks proposes: making "theory [that] emerges from the concrete, from [their] efforts to make sense of everyday life experiences, from [their] efforts to intervene critically in [their] life and the lives of others." FIND PAGE Ultimately, it will be what bell hooks calls for in Ain't I a Woman, a theory that expresses

  The Significance of Difference

I begin our discussion of oppression in a place where students feel on firm ground--with their own experiences of the differences between females and males. I believe that it is essential to enlist the enthusiasm of men, and of women who feel a need to defend the men in their lives, for this exploration by offering them evidence that oppression affects men as well as women. Thus, I choose to establish the radical feminist proposition that men and women are different, using sex-role socialization as the focus. I ask them to examine their own experiences growing up female or male and to describe examples in writing. This appeal to personal experience has come under fire recently in pedagogical literature. But as hooks argues, ". . . sharing personal narratives yet linking that knowledge with academic information really enhances our capacity to know" (Teaching 148). Once a class agrees that, however it happens, women and men are different, I tell them that they have embraced a radical feminist viewpoint. I tell them that their friends' predictions were right: they are turning into radical feminists. Few students find it easy to continue in an oppositional mode by this time; laughter at ourselves diffuses some of the resistance they brought with them. It will return, of course, but for now, at least, we know that we can listen to each other and laugh without anger.

Next, students must provide examples of how males are damaged by sex-role socialization. For instance, we look at how the traditional family system keeps fathers uninvolved in their children's lives, something many of these middle-class students have experienced. Most resistant students seem to find this an enlightening assignment. They are prepared to hear feminists say that women are mistreated, that women are discriminated against, or that women's socialization somehow damages them, and some of them have marshalled their arguments against those positions already. I choose to side-step that confrontation, leaving it to the rest of the semester's content to address those arguments. Instead, I "allow students to claim a knowledge base from which they can speak" (Teaching 148) and then move them from their own awareness to new perspectives. Not only does focusing on how sex-role socialization affects men take students by surprise and challenge their assumption that this is going to be a male-bashing class, but it also brings immediate engagement in analysis. It bypasses their resistance by getting them to critically examine something they know but have never thought about as a category of analysis before.

The Imperative to Question Theory

Next we have to ask why it matters that women and men are different. What has this to do with oppression? Virginia Woolf's statement, "Women and men are different. What needs to be made equal is the value placed on those differences," gets at the crux of the issue. Why does difference so often lead to unequal value?

  The relevance is, of course, the fact that theories about the subordination of women focus on the very biological and psychological differences between women and men that the class has just been discussing. In the survey class, a reading assignment from Sheila Ruth's anthology, Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women's Studies, familiarizes students with several of these theories. The narrow theories she briefly presents are easily criticized, and Sheila Ruth herself intentionally juxtaposes them in ways that encourage disbelief. I challenge students to point out as many weaknesses as they can in these theories. This exercise reinforces my insistence that in this class, their task is to think, to examine, and to reject wherever necessary, rather than to memorize the text for an exam.

  Theories of Difference

Once students seem ready to throw caution to the wind and argue with me and the material, I introduce two more theories of oppression, both emphasizing the importance of difference, one from Marilyn French's Beyond Power: Women, Men, and Morals, and the other from Iris Young's Justice and The Politics of Difference. Both of these theoretical approaches offer heuristics to be used throughout the semester.

 Marilyn French

Much simplified, what French suggests is that we think the mere recognition of difference gives us permission to oppress. That is, difference is not just a "problem" in a culturally diverse society, but rather its own justification for abuse. Over time, says French, the tendency to oppress those seen as different from ourselves has become a part of our patriarchal cognitive mode, the habitual way in which we process new information.

Along with chronological narration, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, exemplification, and persuasion, categorization is one of the rhetorical strategies through which we make sense of our environment; without these modes, we would be unable to function in a changing setting. Our dependence on categorization as a deep cognitive process makes its relationship to oppression especially insidious.

French argues that we automatically categorize new information; she posits that our tendency to categorize and then rank--people, ideas, actions--too often leads us to oppress. French says that the patriarchal cognitive mode includes a subconscious belief that if two things are different, one of them must be superior, and the one that is superior has a right and a responsibility to control the other one (18). We are literally unable to view different entities as having equal value, let alone as deserving equal rights. Members of categories ranked higher are expected to control members of lower categories, and members of lower categories are expected to obey unquestioningly. In fact, control itself has become the highest value, the "dominant morality," in the patriarchal mindset, and it is this control which French links with oppression (19). Thus, it requires a conscious effort and a major retraining of the mind to challenge oppression.

At first, students may find this construct too obvious and simple to be "true." That is, it is so easy to find the flaw in the process--the assumption of superiority--that many feel that intelligent human beings couldn't possibly be enmeshed in it. But simplicity is one of the major strengths of the theory.

One or two examples serve to win French's theory credibility. When European invaders noted an abundance of significant differences between themselves and the indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere--differences of dress, food, religion, interaction, and sexual expression--they reacted as typical patriarchal thinkers. Given the known categories in the European cognitive structure, it was easy for them to conclude that they were in all ways superior to these "savages," and to decide that it was both their right and their responsibility to control them. They put European clothing on them, forced them to embrace European religion and social mores, and if they refused, resorted to the ultimate control--genocide. On what other grounds than difference were these controlling behaviors justified? French says none. Difference alone permits oppression, requires it, in fact.

A second example utilizes the way humans routinely treat other animal species. On the basis of widely-accepted differences, most humans consider ourselves superior to other animals and believe that we have a right and a responsibility to control them: make pets of them, eat them, preserve them from extinction, creatively breed them, and so on. Again, difference is clearly the justification for control. We think we would never choose to treat our own species in these ways.

These examples are effective because they are so unassailable. They make it easy to see how difference has been used to rank and how ranking assigns privilege and power.

Another useful aspect of French's theory of oppression is that we can see that interrupting the subconscious process challenges oppression, so that as we go through the semester, we can use this framework both to recognize oppression and to suggest actions to resist it. When students are introduced to this conceptualization, and shown how it works, it strikes them as stunningly familiar, something they've known but had no words for, and they immediately begin seeing examples everywhere they turn. They also experience it as quite empowering:

 Iris Young

I also refer to the work of Iris Young, who explains "the importance of social group differences in structuring social relations and oppression" (3). In contrast to the currently popular "color-blind" approach to ending oppression (popular, at least, with many of my students), she argues that "where social group differences exist and some groups are privileged while others are oppressed, social justice requires explicitly acknowledging and attending to those group differences in order to undermine oppression" (3). I find that many of my students believe quite sincerely that at least in the United States, group differences are irrelevant to any discussion of oppression. Many accept the naive proposition that the "level playing field" is in full operation, and that failure to achieve "the American Dream" is an individual phenomenon for which the individual is completely responsible. As one young woman put it, "If a person does not want to be oppressed, then he/she cannot be. It's all a state of mind." In the face of such lack of analysis of how group and individual differences further oppression, it is no wonder that the oppression of women is incomprehensible.

Young echoes hooks in articulating "a mode of critical theory," which is effective in the Women's Studies classroom:

When students can be shown that these are the goals of the course they have entered--clarifying, describing, explaining, articulating, defending, responding--resistance becomes necessary, rather than disruptive. If students are not able or choose not to resist--that is, to think in critical ways about the material and their own "ideals and principles"--our interaction will fail, and they will have wasted their time.

Young declares that "without such a critical stance, many questions about what occurs in a society and why, who benefits and who is harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify the given social reality" (5). When a Women's Studies class asks students to lay their own social theories on the line, "with an emancipatory interest" (Young 5), rather than reaffirming and reifying them, their participation becomes essential. If it is true, as Young contends, that "imagination is the faculty of transforming the experience of what is into a projection of what could be, the faculty that frees thought to form ideals and norms" (6), then only by engaging the students' imaginations can we hope to see them move from resistance to acceptance.

I also offer Young's proposition that oppression has five distinct faces, all enforced on the basis of difference: marginalization, colonialization, powerlessness, violence, and exploitation. These faces of oppression can be presented as aspects of the control French indicts as oppressive. Investigating the five faces is especially fruitful with highly resistant students who feel that oppression is nothing more than a fuzzy-minded myth, invented to excuse victims for their own poor choices in life. The process of defining and exemplifying each of Young's "faces" stimulates discussion and makes oppression concrete.

 Liberal Feminism

We next move to an examination of the development of liberal feminism. We explore how the founding fathers' liberalist social theory and the liberal feminist theory which grew out of it reflect Marilyn French's indictments of patriarchy. On the basis of perceived differences between males and females, the founding fathers institutionalized in the constitution, other laws and policies, and certain roles and status for men and women.

Like the early liberal feminists, we generally agree today that the mark of human beings is our rationality. Students of the nineties have gone through their entire educational lives with the legal right to an equal education regardless of sex, race, etc., the first generation in history to do so, and most argue, with the liberal feminists, based on their own experience, that women are just as rational as men. Most students join liberal feminists in arguing that the differences between women and men have been socially imposed, and that because women are now given equal access to opportunity, women and men function equally well in most situations.

I point out that the issue of access has been a main thrust of feminist activism in the U.S., including the suffrage Movement, for most of the history of the United States. I also offer Radical Women of Color and Marxist critiques of Liberal Feminism, especially the absence of race and class analysis therein, and the problematic nature of the liberal feminist acceptance of masculist ideals as appropriate for women. It is necessary to interject these critiques, because suddenly, lots of students have become "converts" to Liberal Feminism. As one student wrote,

Students like this young woman immediately see the connections of this simplistic presentation to their own presence in college, to the breadth of career choices available to them, and to their sense that there is no serious question anymore of men "really" being superior to women. They are often eager, therefore, to argue that feminism has achieved its aims, and there is no further reason to study it, nor to rehash the society's past discrimination against women. They argue that it is time to "get on with it," for women to take their places as the equals of men, no different "really" from men, and stop complaining.

The Marxist and Radical Feminist critiques of Liberal Feminism, even briefly stated, tend to draw converts back into the complexity of the current situation, and invite them to actively critique liberal feminist theory itself, something they were eager to do in the first place. Ultimately, this sequence of theoretical explanation eventually turns many of the students, unwittingly at first, but later much more consciously, into actual feminist critics of their own culture.

From these theoretical foundations we can move to examination of societal institutions, in introductory classes, or to the plethora of issue areas and theoretical frameworks to which we give our attention in upper-level courses. Thus the theoretical framework for each course reflects itself in its own process, in that each course then develops a set of statements about how the world is, how it got to be that way, and how it ought to be changed, from a women's perspective, with whatever focuses the facilitator and students themselves choose to apply, and with a certain set of goals designed to help students to understand what some of those processes have been.

 The Final Exam

As part of their take-home final exam, students are asked to re-evaluate and write about their own personal social theory. How do they think the world is? What do they think is the nature of human beings? What is it that defines humanity? What do they think about the motivation of human beings, and the status of men and women? Do they think women and men are different, or do they think they are the same? What do they think? Students are asked to put their answers in the theoretical terms they have learned over the course of the semester; thus, we start with theory, we end with theory, and everything in between is examined in theoretical context. It has been my experience that having the theoretical framework enables students to disinvest themselves of their commitment to defending the status quo, because they begin to see that the status quo is just somebody's social theory. Also, they begin to understand that social theory can be conceptualized, and it can be altered if people do not like how it looks in practice.

It's obvious to me that Audre Lorde was right: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." One cannot bring peace by making war. One cannot end oppression by fighting it. Instead we must offer ourselves and our students a way to create new tools that will build harmony and joy.

I have seen evidence that when we can begin to see that oppression comes from within, that it is part of our cognitive mode, our "collective unconscious," to borrow the words of Carl Jung, that it breeds and flourishes in our subconscious minds, we are empowered to interrupt the process. If we see that on some level we have chosen oppression, we can begin to "UNchoose" it. We can refuse to follow categorization by ranking, and ranking by abusive control. Instead, we can choose to respond to difference in a new and different way, not by tolerating it, for tolerance implies something bad to be overlooked, not even by accepting it, for acceptance implies reluctance, but by celebrating it. We can decide to deny the unexamined law of our cognitive mode, and choose instead an intentional life in which oppression plays no part, reflecting the resolve Alice Walker expresses in The Temple of My Familiar:

The theoretical frameworks offered by Marilyn French and Iris Young can free us from the habit of oppression, if we are willing to take responsibility for the workings of our own minds. As one student put it,

Works Cited

Copyright 1998. Annis H. Hopkins. All Rights Reserved.

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