ABSTRACT
WHAT DOES PAULO FREIRE MEAN FOR THOSE OF US WHO DEFINE OURSELVES AS FEMINIST educators? How can feminist educators imagine ourselves as actors in the Freirean world? To address these questions, it seems important not only to examine Freire’s texts, but also to consider what is meant by feminism and feminist pedagogy. First of all, I would like to suggest that feminist pedagogy, like feminism itself, is ultimately a political project. And like other feminist projects, feminist interventions in education have been determined by the historical, economic, and political contexts in which women have lived. Women in all cultures have constructed resistances and identities in response to the historical and social circumstances in which they have found themselves-involving discursive as well as material struggles. By no means does the term feminism include all of these varieties of women’s lives and experiences, but it has become the term around which many women (and some men) have come to theorize attempts at progressive critique and social advancements for women. In the United States, feminism has its historical grounding in Western thought, and has shared the narrowness of vision and racism of the dominant intellectual traditions of the West. The social and political goals of U.S. feminism were originally framed around liberal, Enlightenment conceptions of rights and justice for women; it has subsequently condemned patriarchal desires and practices using the Western discourses of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. This grounding in the Western tradition has been a profound limitation for feminism, as the work of women of color and feminists outside the dominant Western tradition have so forcefully made clear. Nonetheless, I would argue that the vision of feminism as a political intervention is still its strength.
