Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy: Disrupting Feminist Complicity with Coloniality

Abstract

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context.

“If a (queer) revolt is to come”: Toward a sensuous pedagogy for dis/orienting management learning

“…Therefore, in a second part, I propose to queer such a sensorial revolt by turning to Ahmed’s queer phenomenology as her understanding of dis/orientation as “the sixth sense” enables us to sensuously reorient management learning and to transform Serres’ idea of revolt into a queer version. In the third part, I zoom in on the pedagogical work of Fabiane Ramos and Laura Roberts (2021) to concretize and illustrate a sensuous pedagogy as a dis/orientation device. As lecturers in Gender Studies, they draw on Ahmed’s work in combination with other feminist and decolonial authors to develop their “pedagogy of wonder.” The epilogue, finally, offers a new angle by revisiting Matthew Lopez’s (2018) play The Inheritance to suggest that my queer attempt to refuse the legacy of heteronormative learning and education also might enable generations of diverse people to learn, in sensuous ways, from each other and from each other’s otherness.…”

“…However, as these, mostly recent, efforts usually do not foreground the senses and are, quite importantly, largely embedded in a Western epistemology of learning (see Ramos and Roberts, 2021), they might not suffice to finally extend interest in the senses beyond its long-lasting simmering point. A call for a special issue on “The senses in management research and education” (Ashcraft et al, 2019) might indeed try to change this in a more concentrated and more definitive manner.…”

“…We must, however, also look at the conditions under which affect theory arrived as the affective turn is often already straight-lined—dulling feminist sensitivities (Hemmings, 2005) and their intertwining with queer and decolonial genealogies (Ramos and Roberts, 2021). For instance, Hemmings (2005) remarks that affect theory—in ignoring counter-hegemonic contributions of feminist and postcolonial theories—should not miss out on the heteronormative regulation of affect, which can actually strengthen “dominant cultural norms or white, patriarchal ways of knowing, being, and doing” (Dernikos et al, 2020a: 9).…”

“…In this regard, Fabiane Ramos and Laura Roberts (2021) offer a pertinent example of how connecting the personal and the political helps to understand how they halt certain dominant genealogies while opening up for what they call “a feminist pedagogy of wonder.” In their pedagogical self-reflection, Ramos and Roberts draw on their experiences of teaching gender studies in a precarious teaching positionality while aiming to question the genealogy of south–north dynamics to enable decolonial disruption. They see their double act of decolonial feminist activism and a feminist pedagogy of wonder as forming a non-linear and incomplete process as “it goes up and down, in circles; it gets tangled and stuck; it screams for air and sometimes flows like a river” (p. 41).…”

Coloniality and Feminist Collusion: Breaking Free, Thinking Anew

“…It further offers how rural women resist and negotiate epistemic and economic dispossession, providing critiques of the coloniality of gender that adopt different metaphysical commitments, as led by rural actors in the Global South. Sara Shroff’s article, ‘Bold women, bad assets: honour, property and techno-promiscuities’ (2021, this issue), offers another innovative methodological approach, rethinking categories of sexual labour, racialised ethnicity and social media in contemporary Pakistan in relation to capitalism, neoliberalism and nationalism. Through the concept of ‘techno-promiscuities’ developed by the author (an investigation of digital sexuality as speculative currency), Shroff reveals how social media star Qandeel Baloch and other young women negotiate techno-capitalist heteropatriarchal regimes built on discourses of hegemonic masculinity, religion, nation and empire, offering embodiment of different forms of feminist agency through their challenge to normative structures of power.…”