Teaching Philosophy

Malaklou (Jan. 2021) Teaching Philosophy My anti-humanist feminist pedagogy, which also informs my research, encourages students to interrogate the Euro-Enlightenment lore of Hegel et al., by now definitive of our world order. Specifically, I ask students to unpack the ways in which the Euro-Enlightenment’s discourse of time—i.e., “History”—writes racial blackness into (non)being as the human’s antecedent and Other. Stuck in nature, in a time before human time, black persons (and nonblack persons of color in proximity to blackness) are prohibited from ascending the ladder of human civilization, from the forward-march of time that will supposedly ‘progress’ their ways of being and doing and knowing (and feeling) from the ars erotica of the bush to what Michel Foucault famously describes as the modern science of sex—a modernity that catalogues sex, gender, and sexuality as identity and typology. No longer what a person does, sex, gender, and sexuality become, in a post-Euro-Enlightenment world, who a person is. To be left behind by humanism’s march of progress, therefore, is to be denied human identity markers like gender and sexuality. As a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies professor trained in dissident black feminism, I assign texts, creative assignments, public service projects, exam questions, and discussion, forum and paper prompts that deliberately ask students to agitate against the antiblack humanism that has been packaged and sold to them as ‘universal’ and, therefore, liberatory; as well as its science of sex, which determines the range of all of our sex and gender expressions. Students in my classes are thus confronted with difficult, generative questions like, what if black lives haven’t matter because black life cannot matter? What if humanism, which emerged from the mouths of cisgender white men (about cisgender white men), never intended to know and cannot give us a language with which to understand black humanity? How might the knowledge that not all persons are human change the study of (and our claims to) sex, gender, and sexuality? My interactive lectures, which colleague Jeff Richey (Asian Studies, Berea College) describes as a unique “blend of discipline and improvisation [that] is both enviable and deeply necessary,” privilege the study of media content and forms—television and film media, new and viral media, and art mediums—in order to encourage students to think meta-critically about antiblack humanism not just as a political project, but also and notably as a cultural pedagogy and symbolic order; in other words, as the subconscious structure that determines and contains our expressions of sex, gender, and sexuality; hence teaching students to always and restlessly be suspicious of how they consume and produce popular culture. In order to ease students’ anxiety around ‘mastery’ of the course material, I often use PowerPoint slides. These slides incorporate materials from their daily lives, for example, on campus or on social media, as fodder for class discussions. Doing so allows me to build momentum around difficult philosophical concepts—concepts which, while difficult, generatively describe how social structures betray individual intentions—in ways that are immediately relevant to students’ lives, giving them a language with which to put into words what they already and intuitively know or feel to be true. I explain these difficult philosophical concepts from multiple angles both because doing so follows in the practice of interdisciplinary feminism, and because I find that doing so facilitates students’ understanding not just of what a term means, but also how that term clarifies, in different personal and (as) political contexts, the hierarchical operations of our human world-making. Each slide marries a concept with discussion questions in which students must add their own interpretative analysis to the course material. Likewise, I often incorporate student responses to weekly forum posts in my slides, lifting up their arguments as coeval with the authors’. Malaklou (Jan. 2021) Because self-reflection is critical to a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies education, my classroom privileges theory over data. Doing so especially follows in the tradition of women of color femme(inist) re/visions of (white) feminism—including critiques by Berea College’s own bell hooks. Her femme(inist) writings encourage us to stay with the trouble of theory, indeed, to read theory with our bodies, affects, and senses rather than attempt mastery of theory, which is a white supremacist ruse. Theory, as I employ it in the classroom, instead asks students to mine their embodied experiences of power and difference for knowledge about the way the world works—i.e., structure—and one’s place in it; as well as for alternative models of living that can accommodate their femme(inist) demands. These Other ways of being and doing and knowing and feeling are important; they remind feminists, as hooks famously does, that “there [can] be no real sisterhood…if white women [are] not able to divest of white supremacy, if feminist movement” — i.e., ‘progress’— “[is] not fundamentally anti-racist;” that is to say, if (white) feminism is not able to divest of the social and political constructions of time that caricature black persons, especially—as Hortense Spillers1 and, before her, the Combahee River Collective2 argue—black women and femmes, as the human’s antecedent and Other, in other words, as (non)beings who cannot access the ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ that would allow them to transcend the sins of their undifferentiated, sensational flesh. My objective, then, is to prompt students to interrogate their affective and material investments in human world-making, specifically, in the taxonomies that organize and structure our human world and how one knows and names and feels the self within its terms. The pessimism characteristic of my approach is not antiblack; rather, it is anti-world, because it asks students to imagine and enact what might exist outside of the human’s frame, in what Fred Moten describes as the “elsewhere and elsewhen”3 of our (feminist) freedom dreams. In lectures as well as discussions, I ask students to interrogate the way that they think in the first place, at once dislodging their (bad) faith in ‘universal’ humanism as well as their hegemonic assumption that black persons’ exclusion from human sexed and gendered categories is a closed door to relationality. Students instead learn that such unruliness —i.e., in which one cannot be ‘boxed’ or contained by sexed and gendered ‘-isms’—is a portal into an/Other sociality, a condition of possibility for ‘fundamentally ant-racist’ feminist living. 1. In her canonical essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (Diacritics 17.2 [1987]), Spillers explains that black women and femmes are the ‘zero degree’ (i.e., the bottom rung) of our ‘social conceptualization’—in other words, of Enlightenment humanism’s symbolic order. 2. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). 3. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” in The South Atlantic Quarterly Volume 112, Number 4 (2013) 746.