{"id":114,"date":"2010-10-13T11:15:01","date_gmt":"2010-10-13T09:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=28"},"modified":"2010-10-13T11:15:01","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T09:15:01","slug":"queerying-my-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2010\/10\/13\/queerying-my-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"QUEERYING MY TEACHING"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was teaching Wuthering Heights<\/em>, trying to convince my students that when Heathcliff characterises his wife Isabella as a very dumb creature who has stupidly mistaken him for a gentleman hero of romance, Emily Bront\u00eb is actually pulling the rug under our feet \u2013\u2018we\u2019 being the women readers who, like Isabella, are mesmerised by the villain Heathcliff. <\/p>\n

I was in the middle of ranting about the ills of clich\u00e9d romantic fiction and how it generates too many dependent, abused Isabellas in real life when I realised that my focus on the heterosexual readers of Bront\u00eb\u2019s masterpiece was excluding a male gay student in my class. He\u2019s openly gay, in case this clarification is necessary (um, just I am openly heterosexual\u2026). Not that he complained at all; I did, silently and to myself, feeling suddenly self-conscious about how the heteronormative 19th century discourse was colonising my own teaching.<\/p>\n

As a researcher I specialise in Gender Studies (yes, not Women\u2019s Studies) and that\u2019s how I teach. Many may disagree with this approach but I feel that as a feminist teacher of English Literature I fulfil a double mission: teaching about the texts as outstanding narrative, and teaching about their heteronormative context in order to make ours more visible, less powerful. This, of course, supposedly might also help any gay student, male or female (why are the lesbian girls so invisible??). <\/p>\n

Actually, I am reading Wuthering Heights<\/em> with a focus on how the unexpected homoerotic bonding between Heathcliff and Hareton should not blind us to Bront\u00eb\u2019s defence, through the latter\u2019s vindication, of a softer version of patriarchy by no means subversive. Yet, I hadn\u2019t wondered until last week whether this is enough. I do have the training to offer passable queer readings of all the Victorian texts I\u2019m dealing with \u2013think what comes next: Great Expectations<\/em>, Dr. Jekyll<\/em>, Heart of Darkness<\/em>– but I am not sure heterosexual me can be totally fair to the identities and interests of the homosexual(s) in class. I am not (hetero)queer enough no matter how hard I try not to be, at least, heteronormative straight. I do hope that my assessment is fair enough to alternative queer readings of the texts and I hope they materialise.<\/p>\n

As happens, I\u2019ll be teaching in a few days a seminar within Dr. Rodrigo Andr\u00e9s\u2019s exciting \u2018Queer Readings\u2019 extension course at UB. My seminar deals with Sarah Water\u2019s lesbian novel, Tipping the Velvet<\/em>. I had submitted a 20 minute paper to the conference that Prof. Andr\u00e9s has organised for 4-5 November, \u00abNoves subjectivitats\/sexualitats liter\u00e0ries\u00bb, but I was invited instead to expand that into a 3-hour-session. My panic transformed my paper on Waters\u2019 mainstream success into an examination of how I, as a heterosexual feminist, can read a lesbian text that doesn\u2019t address me. Can, not may, as I believe I have a right to read Waters, as much as my gay student surely can read (critically) that heterosexual<\/em> novel, Wuthering Heights<\/em>, and queer it. I should ask him to enlighten me about how he\u2019s doing it, though I don\u2019t know whether this should be privately over coffee or publicly in class. To be honest, I don\u2019t even know how to address the issue\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was teaching Wuthering Heights, trying to convince my students that when Heathcliff characterises his wife Isabella as a very dumb creature who has stupidly mistaken him for a gentleman hero of romance, Emily Bront\u00eb is actually pulling the rug under our feet \u2013\u2018we\u2019 being the women readers who, like Isabella, are mesmerised by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}