Why Are We Reading Ovids Handbook on Rape?
Cultural Politics & the Promise of Democracy
Henry A. Giroux, Series Editor
Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
by Paul Street
The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy
by Henry A. Giroux
Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizens Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric
by Donald Lazere
Why Are We Reading Ovids Handbook on Rape? Teaching and Learning at a Womens College
by Madeleine Kahn
Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, Second Edition
by Henry A. Giroux
Caught in the Crossfire
by Lawrence Grossberg
Forthcoming
Reading French Feminism
by Michael Payne
Listening Beyond the Echoes: Agency and Ethics in a Mediated World
by Nick Couldry
Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education, Updated Edition
by Mark Olssen
Why Are We Reading Ovids Handbook on Rape?
Teaching and Learning at a Womens College
Madeleine Kahn
First published 2005 by Paradigm Publishers
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kahn, Madeleine, 1955
Why are we reading Ovids handbook on rape? : teaching and learning at a womens college / Madeleine Kahn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59451-102-0 (hard : alk. paper) 1. Feminism and educationCaliforniaOaklandCase studies. 2. WomenEducation (Higher)CaliforniaOaklandCase studies. I. Title.
LC197.K35 2005
378.198220979466dc22
2005004909
ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-102-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-103-5 (pbk)
Designed and typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
For Timothy W. Bishop,
with love.
Life just keeps getting richer, deeper, and fuller.
Contents
The first time I began to realize that teaching at Mills, a womens college, was changing my ideas about what might be possible in the literature classroom was when I had been at Mills for four or five years and I was asked to give a speech to the graduating seniors. The occasion was the Senior Pin Dinner, a ritual that aims to foster sentimental bonds among classmates, and that starts off the countdown of events toward graduation. My first instinct was to refuse the invitation, but many of these students had taken three or four classes with me over their years at Mills, and I hated to refuse them. In the end I surprised myself by agreeing to give the speech.
I immediately had some misgivings. What sort of performance had I gotten myself into? For weeks I asked everyone I encountered what the speeches usually given at the Senior Pin Dinner were like. How long were they? What sorts of topics did they address? One of the first people I asked was a colleague who had been at Mills for over twenty years. Oh, they really love you if theyve asked you to do that, she said. Theyve never asked me. My heart sank. Suddenly I was engaged in a competition over personality. I felt the slimy tentacles of this tiny community closing around me, and I briefly regretted saying yes. I tried to get rid of my dread by getting some direction from the seniors on the dinner committee. They said unhelpful things like, be profound or be inspirational. This only made me more nervous, so I finally stopped asking people what to talk about and tried to think about what I would have wanted to hear at such a function when I was a senior in college.
The dinner was held in the student union, a large room in one of the old buildings on campus. It had exposed wooden beams in a high ceiling, and filled as it was with tables covered in white cloths, was quite an imposing venue. The entire senior class was at the dinner, along with the officers of the college and some faculty members who had been nominated for the position of an honorary class member. Students from other classes were serving the meal. The size of the gathering made me very nervous during dinner. This seemed odd to me at the time, and I kept reminding myself that I had given many talks to larger and more critical audiences than this. But then, the substance of this talk was a departure for me. For I had surprised myself a second time when I was writing drafts of the speech by placing a personal anecdotea true story from my years in graduate schoolat the center of the speech. While writing the speech I began to think more fruitfully about all the aspects of teaching at Mills College that I was finding surprising, frustrating, and puzzling. I began to discover that, while I was neither able nor willing to give students the kind of access to me that they seemed to be demanding, I could give them something more valuable: the opportunity to take their ideas seriously enough to develop them fully.
Before I give the details of that speech, I want to describe myself physically. I give physical descriptions of the students who appear in the other chapters of this book, and so it seems appropriate to give the same kind of information about myself before you hear what I have to say. I have dark blond hair, and I wear rimless glasses. I am a fairly small person, but I have big shoulders from swimming, and quite a deep voice. Added to the authority that my position at the head of the classroom gives me, these aspects of my physical presence cause students often to perceive me as taller than I am. It is not uncommon for me to pass a student in the hallway late in the semester, only to have her ask, Have you always been this short? So I seem to be simultaneously a short person and a large figure. I dress well for teaching, as part of my professional demeanor: usually pants in the winter and dresses or skirts in the spring and fall. I have a collection of funky earrings and pins, such as matching dog and fire hydrant earrings, or a crocodile pin with two heads. I wear these in part to amuse myself, and in part to make it easier for students to make those important, small connections to me which I talk about in later chapters. Toward the end of any semester I am less well dressed and generally more haggard. For this Senior Pin Dinner at the end of the fall semester, I had tried to pull myself together. I was wearing silly earrings with dice on them, and a serious jacket, and I stood next to the podium so that I could see all around the room.
Here is what I said:
I am both touched and honored that you have asked me to give this speech tonight. I am also scared to be standing here in front of you. This fear of mine should be gratifying to those of you who have taken my classes and have had to learn to speak up in them. Perhaps you can enjoy the thought that you can always interrupt me tonight to ask, as I do in class, and how is this connected to what we were talking about? or, as some of you call it, asking the so what? question.
