Aligning with feminism: Critical autoethnographic reflections of a profeminist heterosexual male teacher educator

Abstract

In the last two decades, education scholarship has made significant progress in advancing the feminist social justice agenda with women scholars having been almost entirely the drivers of this movement. Women scholars in teacher education have been successful in establishing and consolidating this disciplinary field of study quite firmly in the teacher education curriculum. Despite this, many forms of oppression, including domestic or intimate partner violence and sex- and gender-based violence, continue to plague South African universities and society in general. The current COVID-19 pandemic's mandatory home confinement restrictions have further exacerbated the conditions for individuals likely to experience domestic violence. Men have been relatively silent and inactive in this social justice project. There is also limited extant scholarship that addresses the role that profeminist men might play in this social justice enterprise. There is also little work that attempts to understand the level of sophistication with which men understand feminism, determine with which feminisms men might align themselves, and the accountability and responsibility that might come with assuming certain positions. In this critical autoethnographic piece, I engage with the questions of how critical pedagogical encounters in a teacher education course might serve as disruptive devices that trouble stubbornly resistant gendered socialisations. I draw on my experiences as a teacher educator as I struggle to locate and identify my own profeminist positionality and the tensions this presents. I contemplate the poststructuralist caution about writing (my)self into a text given that the writing self is an evolving/changing self. I reflect on my attempt to disrupt obliviousness as I contemplate the prospect of self-disclosure as a point of entry for profeminist men's praxis in a teacher education programme subscribed to by young men (and women) deeply socialised in a patriarchal history and culture.