ABSTRACT
I COME TO WRITING THIS CHAPTER WITH SOME RESISTANCE TO YET ANOTHER GO around with male thought in the context of critical pedagogy. This resistance is not so much about engaging with thinkers who are male as it is about the usefulness of feminist engagement with particular kinds of gendered practices of critique. Rereading Elizabeth Ellsworth’s response to critics of her “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?” I am struck with the continued pertinence of her call for “nothing less than collective self-displacement” in critiquing the basic concepts of critical pedagogy for complicity in “symbolic and material violence” (1990, 404). Ellsworth’s point in both the 1989 article and her 1990 response to her critics is the cost of educators’ not recognizing the limits of our own knowledge in building alliances across differences. This results in a failure to address the social relations of knowing and the critique of key concepts and assumptions underlying the discourse of critical pedagogy that Ellsworth calls for in her concluding paragraph: show me how what you say “will always be partial, interested, and potentially oppressive and then we can talk” (1989, 324).
