Classroom Update from Before and Beyond Gender and Feminism

If not for the havoc caused by COVID-19, I would not have been able to teach through The Manne Family Teaching Fellowship this summer. As a member of the Freedom Summer Collegiate Teacher Advisory Board, I helped by conducting interviews for other stellar candidates to fulfill the teaching posts with no idea that I would be in for yet another transformative summer myself. When Freedom Summer Collegiate realized that in-person programming would be unlikely and even dangerous, I partnered with my co-teacher Monica or Professor H, as our students came to know her. We put together “Before & Beyond Gender & Feminism in Popular Music & Literature.” It has truly been a blessing to work with our group of students this summer, not just because I know that we positively impacted each student but also because I learned so much about myself and my pedagogical and methodological practices and made a long-lasting connection with them and Monica.

Our students are intelligent, hilarious, passionate, inspirational, and unique. I looked forward to class each week because I knew that they were going to teach me. We spoke about sexism, racism, classism, capitalism, nationalism, and made connections between in-class materials and out-of-class happenings. With the on-going work of Black Lives Matter and its allies, the timing was ripe for students to mine everything for meaning. Our students—Callie, Tee, Mya, Janett, Jeromy, and Alyssa—learned about feminism and gender and then breached the boundaries sometimes created by both to analyze popular music videos. By the end of the course, they were able to identify different types of feminisms and unaligned voices, which often get silenced or masked by feminist discourses. Most importantly, they realized that one can choose not to be feminist and still do the work feminists claim. Significantly, they started to see, if not wholly, that there are gray areas even when (and, perhaps, especially) they think that something is only black or/and white. Our students learned that not to be a feminist is not to be anti-female, anti-woman, anti-anything, really and that the production of ideologies and discourses always benefits someone. The questions became who benefits most from specific labels, and why does any of this matter.

I met students where they already were. They were unsure about feminism and if there was a space outside of feminism that was not “on the wrong side” of social injustice. I will always remember when Jeromy transitioned from hesitating to say that he was not feminist but that he supports women and the LGBTQIA community to unequivocally asserting that he was “unaligned” and will show his support to feminists and all women by listening and engaging in dialogue, providing support to the many women in his life, voting for candidates that push gender equality forward (among other issues), and the like. At the start of class, he was tentative to state his views because, as the only boy in the class, he worried if he was supposed to claim feminism and feared backlash. Within the short five weeks, I saw him grow from being shy about his views on such issues to holding his own despite possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations (confidence I, myself, continue to strive toward). Similarly, another fond memory is when Tee said that she loved learning about how resistance to sexism, racism, and classism (etc.) shows through music videos and more about feminism, too. Our class culminated in final projects in which students could either write an essay choosing and arguing their position as feminist, unaligned, or none of the above or make a reaction video to a music video illustrating the analytical tools learned in class and making connections to the content of the class (i.e., resistance, language, feminism, gender, and the like). 

Mya spoke the least in class and had the most interesting final project. She reacted to Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” In a small (but big) part of her analysis, she said, “When [enslaved families] were emancipated, Black families were promised 40 acres and a mule to build them a house, have crops, and all that so their families can live, and they never got it. Still, to this day, they never got it. And then at the same time, he’s [Lamar] standing on a traffic light pole in a position that no human can stand in without support from another object. So, I feel like he’s saying no matter what position you put us in, we’re not going to fall. It might be challenging, but we’re not going to fall.” Ultimately, Mya’s analysis (here and in her final project as a whole) highlights what I hope all of my students took away from our time together: We (Black and brown people) have a rich history of resistance that continues today in various forms. Regardless of the form and regardless of what we call ourselves (i.e., unaligned, feminist, etc.), many of our goals align even if our strategies differ. We have, can, will, and do overcome. We do not have to believe the same or claim the same ideologies to achieve what most of us want, but we do all have to think that there can be, will be, and is a better tomorrow together.

I learned so much from my students and am beyond blessed to have been allowed to teach again through FSC. My experiences reaffirmed that the quietest and seemingly distracted students are always listening and learning and that teaching each student looks and feels differently, even on a day-to-day basis. I was reminded that although our classes are constructed in opened and closed ways, by which I mean that they have a “start” of a certain type of knowledge and, theoretically, an “end” (or else each syllabus would continue forever), as an educator and forever learner, it is okay to recognize that everything cannot be taught in a course even longer than five weeks and that learning, of course, must continue after each course. It is okay to feel like the course was “incomplete” because every class, after all, is in some way. Our learning must and should continue.