ABSTRACT
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes, “Th e erasure of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information. We are invited to teach information as though it does not emerge from bodies.”1 hooks’s focus on embodiment and how it can “deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated”2 compels us to contemplate the ways in which paradigms of power and dominance are both maintained and challenged in society and more particularly in our classrooms. Important aspects of her liberatory and transformative pedagogy include the interrogation of identity categories, calling into question essentialist politics while considering the importance of “experience as a standpoint on which to base analysis or formulate theory.”3 As part of this project, hooks discusses the need for students and professors to regard each other as “whole” human beings, and though hooks never suggests that this off ers a universal answer to the problems of sexism, racism, and classism, she does suggest that the classroom is a critical space for the deconstruction of hegemonic practices which reinforce and sustain practices of domination.
