But let's not kid ourselves: This war is not about freeing women from government-mandated burqas, or teaching girls to read, or improving Afghan women's ghastly maternal mortality rate of 17 in 1,000 births -- the second highest in the world.
Katha
Pollitt
The Nation
11.30.01
| Feminist pedagogy can be used to transform a students' relationship to mainstream media. Feminist pedagogy is about questioning, however this does not refer to a pluralist apolitical method of valuing all answers, but instead acknowledges the power relations that exist in contemporary mainstream media. Feminist pedagogy must examine the interconnections between racism, classim and sexism, not ranking oppressions, but instead realize the complexities that produce knowledge and create power. "Race, class, and gender intersectionality is not merely an approach one should adopt, but an approach having conceptual and methodological merit." (Collins, 117) Feminist Pedagogy must work from this intersectionality. |
| While many would think that feinism is only about addressing the inequalities
of women, feminist pedagogical theory is a awareness of the power relationships
between communities, individuals and institutions. Therefore, feminist pedagogy
explores the root causes of oppressive ideology which manifests in our mainstream
media. What do I mean by "mainstream media"? Mainstream media
is the network of news resources owned and operated by large corporations
who have a political agenda that limits information in order to maintain
a system of inequalities. Every resource of information has a particular
agenda, however, mainstream media's agenda is fueled by racism, classism
and sexism, or by apolitical "mutlicultural" ideology which ignores
the violence that is connect to ideas of "difference". Mainstream
media fuels the ideology of cultural capital, selling "difference"
and "exoticizing" marginality in order to colonize and exploit. |
| In order for feminists to address the oppressive language of American media culture, she/he must deconstruct whiteness particularly how it relates to the shaping of identity by mainstream media. This is predominatly the issue with white feminists who are concern with womens oppression but refuse to address structures of discrimination within feminist theory, especially the attempt to talk about racism only in relation to the "black body" as seperate from the "white body". |
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How is "whiteness" working in our media to support the oppressive structure of binary truths. Even in feminist alternative news the imperialist logic of "us" and "them" positions the women of the Middle East in a "inanimate space". The space between us is not the problem, difference should be honored, however it is how the space is articulated and discussed that leads to victimization of Afghanistad women by American women. The media has done a wonderful job in juxtaposing the "liberated white middle class" woman with the "obressed, hidden, silent" Afghanistad woman. This binary comes out of a long history of colonization, racism, sexism, and the universal "white" truth. Feminist pedagogy cannot seperate itself from this history. We must confront the construction of white womanhood and how it builds American identity. Feminist pedagory dislocates the dominant positon of mainstream media and positions the student as a body which can refuse participation in the acquiesce of the subject. |
