Feminist pedagogy is an engagement with learning through critique of processes

which reinforce domination

hooks 65, social activist, feminist theorist, educator, writer (youre a square if you dont know who bell
hooks is), (bell, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, South End Press, Chapter 8, pp. 49-50)

4. At this historical moment, there is a crisis of engagement within universities, for when knowledge
becomes commoditized, then much authentic learning ceases. Students who want to learn hunger for a
space where they can be challenged intellectually. Students also suffer, as many of us who teach do,
from a crisis of meaning, unsure about what has value in life, unsure even about whether it is important
to stay alive. They long for a context where their subjective needs can be integrated with study, where
the primary focus is a broader spectrum of ideas and modes of inquiry, in short a dialectical context
where there is serious and rigorous critical exchange. This is an important and exciting time for feminist
pedagogy because in theory and practice our work meets these needs. 5. Feminist education-the
feminist classroom is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle. Where there is visible
acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students
to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary
university. Most importantly, feminist pedagogy should engage students in a learning process that
makes the world "more rather than less real. It my classrooms, we work to dispel the notion that our
experience is not a real world" experience. This is especially easy since gender is such a pressing issue
in contemporary life. Every aspect of popular culture alerts us to the reality that folks are thinking about
gender in both reactionary and progressive ways. What is important is that they are thinking critically.
And it is this space that allows for the possibility of feminist intervention, whether it be in our classroom
or in the life of students outside the classroom. Lately, there has been a truly diverse body of students
coming to my classes and other feminist classes at universities all around the United States. Freire
writes, Education as the practice of freedom-as opposed to education as the practice of domination-
denies that we are abstract, isolated. independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the
world exists as a reality apart from us. 6. To make a revolutionary feminist pedagogy, we must
relinquish our ties to traditional ways of teaching that reinforce domination. To have a revolutionary
feminist pedagogy we must first focus on the teacher-student relationship and the issue of power. How
do we as feminist teachers use power in a way that is not coercive, dominating? Many women have had
difficulty asserting power in the feminist classroom for fear that to do so would be to exercise
domination. Yet we must acknowledge that our role as teacher is a position of power over others. We
can use that power in ways that diminish or in ways that enrich and it is this choice that should
distinguish feminist pedagogy from ways of teaching that reinforce domination. One simple way to alter
the way one's power as teacher is experienced in the classroom is to elect not to assume the posture
of all-knowing professors. This is also difficult. When we acknowledge that we do not know everything,
that we do not have all the answers, we risk students leaving our classrooms and telling others that we
are not prepared. It is important to make it clear to students that we are prepared and that the
willingness to be open and honest about what we do not know is a gesture of respect for them.
Social factors code gendered acts, making gender performative and not stable. Our
feminist critique is an attempt to break down power relations that shape a normative
definition of woman and directs violence towards bodies that dont correctly
perform gender
Mikkola 17, Junior Professor in Practical Philosophy at the Humboldt-University, Berlin, (Mari,
Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2017
edition) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/feminism-gender/ // PZ

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of
one's gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not a
stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is instituted
through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-
coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one's hair in gender-coded
manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a
doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in feminising and masculinising acts congeals
gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are. Gender only
comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her
gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as compelling illusion[s] (Butler 1990,
271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction: social factors wholly
determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any facts of the matter
(Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing
their gender wrong are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that
they are performed (Butler 1990, 2789). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans
person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting
in ways that are associated with femininity show that [as Butler suggests] being feminine is just a
matter of doing certain activities (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person's gender is just as real
or true as anyone else's who is a traditionally feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278).[5]
Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any
genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these
gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics
involves two things. First, feminists should understand woman as open-ended and a term in process, a
becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end it is open to intervention
and resignification (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define woman at all. Second,
the category of women ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics (Butler 1999, 9). Rather,
feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings
of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.