ABSTRACT
Teaching and learning feminism have always been both risky and pleasurable. The risks, as Teresa de Lauretis (1987) reminds us, concern the experiences of becoming feminist in a sexist society. In part, becoming feminist is difficult because it is entails the persistent critique of dominant cultural representations of women and the equally persistent marginalization of feminist representations. Paradoxically, within such difficulties lie pleasures; for example, the possibility of forming a new (and oppositional) identity. While much of the writing about feminist classrooms has emphasized how they offer knowledge that enables feminist struggles, it also draws attention to women's refusals to take up such knowledge (Briskin and Coulter 1992; Lather 1991; Lewis 1990; Martindale 1992). There is much resistance to learning from feminist knowledge, and these narratives of resistance trouble and complicate the view that Women's Studies provides a learning environment that recognizes women's intellectual and emotional needs. It is the dynamic of resistance that I wish to problematize here. Following poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories of identity and learning, I read two stories of engagement with feminist knowledge—stories which are in tension both with each other and with dominant feminist pedagogical assumptions. As we shall see, each story implicates its narrator in a notion of identity that both requires and excludes difference. I explore what is at stake for feminist practices of equality when one student's narrative is read as enabling feminist struggles while the other student's narrative is read as disabling them.
