Affiliation:
1. Kathie Friedman is associate professor of International Studies and past Chair of Jewish Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. She is also adjunct associate professor in the Sociology and the Women Studies Departments at University of Washington. She teaches and conducts research on immigrant and refugee families in the United States and Europe.
2. Karen Rosenberg is a doctoral student in the Department of Women Studies at the University of Washington. Her research interests include violence against women, feminist legal theory, and social movements.
Abstract
Teaching about intersecting, fluid and historically contingent identities has been taken up extensively within the sociology of race, class and gender and women's studies. Oddly, the case of Jewish women has been virtually left out of this robust literature. This article explores the challenges raised through teaching the course “Jewish Women in Contemporary America,” and links these challenges to the pedagogy of race, class and gender more broadly. Using the classroom as a research site, the authors conducted post-course interviews with students and kept detailed field notes on class sessions. The authors use Judith Butler's theorization of performativity to analyze classroom dynamics. After redesigning and teaching the course a second time, the authors conclude that the relationship between “experience” and “theory” must be constantly interrogated by both instructor and students; that personal narratives merit space within the classroom, but must be problematized; and a critical Jewish Women's Studies, based on illuminating the socially constructed and hybrid character of contemporary Jewish American women's identities, can help to expose the tendency to methodological essentialism still prevalent in much of the feminist race, class, and gender literature.
Subject
Sociology and Political Science,Education
Cited by
13 articles.
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