I was told yesterday that I must bear in mind that not all of our students agree with the left-wing political position I defend, as a feminist and a socialist, and that some actually support right-wing policies. This is hardly surprising if we take into account voting statistics and the growth of the extreme right among young people all over Europe. It is, nonetheless, less expected in the context of my university, UAB, which has a reputation for being a blue-collar university with a clear left-wing inclination among students. Few campus flaunt, as ours does, a constant stream of left-wing graffiti in our central areas or have student strikes as commonly as ours.

My feminist teaching is encouraged at all points by UAB, which offers a BA degree in Socio-cultural Gender Studies and has a specific mandate to offer balanced selections of readings, so that women authors are always represented in all subjects no matter the degree. This balance needs to be reflected in the official syllabi, though, of course, subjects with a selection of only women authors or male authors face no obstacle as long as they refer to specific aspects of gender. We don’t have a similar mandate for Black authors or LGTBIQ+ authors, which is anyway compensated in the contemporary literature courses we teach by our own selections. We, teachers, don’t follow any other political mandate from UAB beyond respecting gender equality, but this is already a political regulation supposing that the university has a left-wing, liberal disposition. Teachers still unwilling to respect gender equality may disobey the mandate, but do raise criticism from students (I’ve never heard of a penalty). I don’t think UAB would tolerate a teacher who offered openly right-wing opinions, not even under the principle of ‘libertad de cátedra’ (academic freedom).

Since, in short, my own feminist-socialist position is common at UAB and right-wing positions are not really welcome by most students, how are we supposed to deal with students who oppose our political views? This is a rather new problem. In my own time as an undergrad, there were Literature teachers in my Department and in others that were clearly right-wing and didn’t hide their ideas in class, above all their snobbish classism against us, working-class kids. The intense academic activism of the 1990s, with the launching of post-Marxist versions of feminism and Gender Studies, the rise of Queer Studies and Post-colonial Studies, opened up the way for an intense ideological re-interpretation of the canon and the inclusion in class of texts and authors so far discriminated against. We have passed in about thirty years from syllabi dominated by white, cisgender, straight men to offering all-inclusive subjects and tutoring dissertations by absolutely any type of author. This is our normality.

I do not deny that it is a heavily politicized normality and that, often, we run the risk of neglecting the literary elements that make a work worth exploring. I’m certain, however, that we cannot go back to the formalist times when all that mattered were the literary elements to the exclusion of ideology. Now and then an old-school teacher will request that we should do so because our ideological teaching is too excessive and can alienate students. So far, students have supported this ideological reading, but I’m concerned, in view of the warning I got yesterday, about whether those who have concealed their discomfort might start vocalizing it. I’m not speaking of trigger warnings (there has been a timid movement in that direction) but of openly questioning in class our choices and our lecturing. We have noticed that in teachers’ surveys, students’ opinions about our pedagogical styles have become more critical and entitled, and that might be a first sign of what is coming.

Yesterday, right-wing Catalan nationalist party Junts decided not to force the resignation of the extreme right-wing Catalan nationalist mayor of Ripoll, Sílvia Orriols, a woman known for her antimigration, xenophobic positions. Catalan president Salvador Illa, a socialist, protested that “Either you’re for human rights or for the extreme right wing” (“O se está con los derechos humanos o con la extrema derecha”). I’m not an Illa fan, but I have posted on Bluesky this morning that I might change my vocabulary to stop using ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ and start using ‘pro-human rights’ and ‘anti-human rights’. The left/right division is complicated by associations with, respectively, 20th century communism and fascism and it might be necessary to reconduct this, as not all left-wing persons are communist and not all right-wing persons are fascist. My proposal, however, is still beset with all kinds of problems. In fact, I almost quarrelled with my Contemporary Literature class when I insisted that defending Afghan women from the Taliban is a matter of human rights.

The defence of human rights is not a unspecific doctrine, but a position backed by the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” signed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A), after the horrifying WWII. You can see here which countries have ratified the ensuing agreements and check whether you would like to live there. The USA is the only ‘Western’ country to significantly lag behind, not having ratified yet, for instance, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, presented in 1971 to the US Congress as the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. President Joe Biden declared on January 17, 2025, that since many states had passed it, this is the 28th Amendment and is “the law of the land.” This declaration has not been confirmed, which explains a few matters about the current onslaught against women’s reproductive rights.

Why should matters like this be relevant in the teaching of Literature? Well, thinking of the past, Pride and Prejudice becomes a very different kind of story if you recall that in 1813, when it was published, women lost their legal status as independent citizens when they married following the principle of ‘coverture’. If you made a bad marriage to an abusive husband you were lost, as divorce was not available to women: this is what Anne Brontë narrates in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1847). The literature of the present is likewise conditioned by politics and legislation. Think not only of pro-feminist fiction, but also of anti-racist or anti-homophobic fiction. In fact, there is no anti-human rights fiction that I can think of, which is why reading novels such as Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) today is so complicated. It is perfectly possible to read this novel as a condemnatory portrait of a child abuser, but Nabokov’s intention in using a first-person narrative is extremely ambiguous.

Taking into account what is happening in the USA under Trump’s new mandate, we might be headed for a period of radical exclusion, aiming at a return to the canonical dominance of the white, male, cisgender, straight author. No more talk about misogyny, racism, LGTBIQ+ phobia and so on in class or research, and a renewed praise of the literary virtues of dead white males, without any allusion to their ideology. This is how my generation was being taught in the 1980s. Exclusion, however, is the lesser evil, for the young can always grow rebellious and read what is banned, forbidden or merely despised. What worries me is the ideological reversal by which the attackers of humans rights are renaming repression as freedom or knowledge as ideology, following Orwell’s newspeak and doubletalk. Think, for instance, of a lecture on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a harrowing novel about the struggle of an enslaved woman to first reach freedom and then lay down the literal ghosts of the past. This novel is always taught from an anti-racist, pro-feminist point of view, which defends the human rights of the enslaved persons. Now, imagine how a teacher who does not believe in human rights and might defend slavery would teach or write about Beloved. In case you were thinking this is the solution, there is absolutely no way you could teach Beloved ignoring its legal and political background.

The young persons who are endorse autocratic regimes all over the world, often do so thinking that politics are boring and a nuisance, and it would be great to forget about them by electing leaders for life. That could work if the persons who volunteered to lead for life did so truly following a willingness to serve, rather than to empower themselves. There is talk in the USA of installing an absolutist monarchy, and Trump called himself ‘king’ in a post celebrating one of his decrees. Spain was dominated by a leader for life, dictator Francisco Franco, for 40 years, and that didn’t go well for the defenders of human rights (the attackers were happy, though). So, yes, democracy can be very tiring but it gives you the chance to defend human rights and, what is best, to get rid of useless leaders every few years. Voting is not that hard, really, and, if you ask me, if should be mandatory.

As for how we teach Literature, at this point I do not know what the next years will bring, particularly considering that in the last decades we have followed the US lead in the dismantling of academic patriarchy. Trump’s defunding of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programmes and positions must be having already a deep impact, but there is a rather worrying silence in the press and the social media, possibly because people are shocked and stunned. Decisions about which texts and authors we can teach and how could be soon fraught, even outside the USA. Many university presses and private academic publishers might decide to stop publishing certain types of pro-human rights research (think of a dissertation on trans authors, for instance). The National Science Foundation has a now a list of banned and trigger words in federal grant writing. The website I’m citing advices being practical and disguising these words, but this includes replacing ‘women’ with ‘adults girls’… I’ll stop here, take a deep breath…