This thesis comprises an analysis of ways to approach developing feminist pedagogies. Its main premise is that given the ideological, political and problematic nature of teaching and learning within educational institutions, it is not possible to define and prescribe a certain set of teaching behaviours that would constitute 'successful feminist pedagogy' in all circumstances. Instead, the thesis explores the changing nature of feminist theories, particularly the shift from essentialist feminism to feminisms of difference. It also considers a range of other influences on feminist teachers as they develop their approaches to teaching. These influences include critical and radical pedagogical theories; the impact of women on the teaching profession; postmodernism; using critique and reflection within the classroom; the nature of relationships in classrooms; the role of teacher education; and developments within English education. Since I am a feminist English teacher, I draw on my own classroom experiences, both at secondary and pre-service teacher education levels. I use these experiences not as models of feminist teaching practice, but as material to reflect on ways in which a feminist teacher might move towards creating intellectual imaginings for changing her classroom work so that it contributes to an ever-evolving vision of a different feminist future. The thesis is also concerned with the processes involved in intellectual work and in becoming a feminist teacher. Within the text I have used both journal writing, and personal reflection on classroom events, to disrupt the otherwise authoritative tendencies of thesis statements. This is why, rather than coming to conclusions about the specific attributes of feminist classrooms, I suggest ways in which feminist teachers can work on their own transition towards reflective, critical and feminist classroom practices.

Contemporary Western feminist scholarship fails to explore the backdrop to the naturalization of feminine subjugation. By analyzing the structures, histories, and theories of gender relations, this study dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and, in doing so, demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked or rendered invisible within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are constructed and perpetuated in contemporary Western feminist theory. In part, this perpetuation is achieved through the pedagogical and theoretical exclusions from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities and expressions. Privileging of identities is demonstrated through the designation of literary space and in an overview of dominant theories, such as how the feminine subject is maintained as the object of critique and as not able to be “properly” feminist. This assessment of gender studies course texts reveals a limited understanding of femme and femininity that maintains these identities as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. Feminist theory demonstrates an embedded normative feminist subject, one marked by whiteness and body privileges. By deconstructing the privileging of theories of the normative feminist subject, this study argues that gender studies has replicated feminist histories in which the politics and concerns of the white socially privileged subject are the first to be addressed. While white femininity is present in hir Otherness and in critiques of hir femininity, the racially marked femme does not exist, even in absence. The femme—as a queer potentiality—offers a way of thinking and re-thinking through the limitations of contemporary Western feminist theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-09 19:36:29.903