The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 1 (Fall, 1998) of the APA Newsletters

Since the second wave of feminism,¹ feminist educational theories and practices have systematically politicized emotions as a site of social resistance and transformation.² However, the pioneering work of feminist educators remains largely unrecognized, not only within educational studies but within feminist theories and philosophies. This lack of recognition, I argue, stems largely from misogynistic backlash which discredits, attacks, and perpetuates misconceptions of consciousness-raising (CR) and feminist pedagogies. Influenced by this misogyny, feminist theories and philosophies of emotion are impoverished as a result. In this essay I hope to encourage a missing conversation between feminist educational work and feminist philosophies of emotion.

Elsewhere, I review more thoroughly the contributions of CR practices and feminist pedagogies to what I call the feminist politics of emotion.³ Here I briefly seek to credit the pioneering and political work of feminist educational work emerging from the women’s liberation movement. I identify the challenges faced by a feminist theory and practice that centrally recognizes emotion. I argue that these challenges are by no means unique to feminist pedagogies, but represent thorny problems yet unresolved by any theoretical or practical approach. I conclude by reviewing two feminist philosophical contributions to politics of emotion which suggest a bridge with feminist educational theories.⁴

In higher education and scholarship, to address emotions is risky business — especially for feminists and others already marginalized within the hierarchy of the academy. Within the hallowed halls, and within a climate which rapidly eliminates arts and humanities while funding of the sciences increases, feminist scholars in particular risk being denied tenure, at worst, as well as earning the reputation as one of the "touchy-feelie" types.

A conservative reactionary attack, exemplified in a recent editorial by journalist John Leo of the U.S. News and World Report, condemned this feminist program in a column written on June 13, 1998.⁵ Leo lambasts "Vision 2000" which will soon be introduced at the University of Massachusetts. According to Leo, this curriculum transformation project would require that "every academic department...hold an annual seminar on gender issues, and gender studies would be introduced into all pertinent programs of institutional research.⁶ His alarm summarizes the mixture of misconception, truths, and attacks on feminist pedagogies:

The apparently innocent term ‘women-friendly pedagogies’ might be enough to revamp the campuses all by itself. At colleges and law schools around the country, some feminists have argued that abstract argument, debating, logic, grading...are all male techniques that many women resent. On this view, ‘female knowledge depends heavily on personal experience, feelings and cooperation, rather than competition or striving for excellence...

A few women’s studies programs seem to be serious academic programs, interested in ideas, evidence, debate and an open search for truth. But most aren’t. Most are part therapy group and part training ground for feminist cadres to fight the patriarchy.

Representative of conservative attacks on feminist work (however one evaluates the actual curriculum program of Vision 2000), this backlash powerfully infuses the climate of education and scholarship surrounding feminisms and pedagogies. Misogyny persists within feminist work in the form of an entrenched mode of Western binary thought, a deceptive sense of either/or. In an insightful essay titled "Trinh Minh-ha’s ‘Difference’ as a Pedagogical Metaphor," (1993) Stacy Wolf uses Trinh’s essay to develop a poststructuralist conception of pedagogy.⁷ Wolf’s introductory discussion lays out some of the central promises and risks of feminist pedagogy: "although most women’s studies professors would probably agree on the importance of providing a safe space for feminist students, I would suggest that women’s studies professors are increasingly insisting on intellectual vigilance" (1993: 31). This persistent binary opposition is deeply disturbing in part because there is nothing inherent to CR or feminist pedagogy which renders "intellectual vigilance" and a "safe space for women" incompatible. Rather, the sense of incompatibility reflects both the genuine challenge of making space for both, as well as the misogynistic attacks and misconceptions regarding CR. However, Wolf’s comments reflect real divisions within women’s studies: "many professors have expressed a deep suspicion of an untheorized consciousness raising format, a rejection of identity politics, and a desire for women’s studies to maintain both institutional acceptance and its decidedly alternative intellectual and political agenda" (ibid).

A pedagogy that recognizes emotions as central to the domains of cognition and morality need not preclude intellectual rigor or critical inquiry.⁹ The radical feminist practices of consciousness-raising and feminist pedagogy have been misconstrued as a pedagogy of uncritical sharing of "feelings," class time spent as "navel-gazing group therapy" in which students sit around and share their feelings to try to feel good about themselves, or gripe about their victimization.

Granted, to develop pedagogies that effectively invite emotions into discussion as well as develop critical inquiry is not an easy task. We have been warned by such theorists as Joan Scott that the invocation of experience as "uncontestable evidence" threatens the "critical thrust of histories of difference" (Scott 1991: 777). Educators who invite students’ experiences into classroom discussion face challenges: how do we challenge one another’s claims to experience? In the era of identity politics, how can we respect differences as well as develop collective and self-reflective skills of critical inquiry regarding the nature of our experiences and claims to truth? Does the invocation of experience and feelings necessarily lead to essentialist claims?

I define "feminist politics of emotion" as the explicit analysis, and resulting individual or collective actions, that challenge the historical and cultural emotional rules which serve to maintain capitalism and patriarchal hierarchy, particularly with respect to the arbitrary gendered division of public and private spheres. Feminist analyses have concentrated on women’s bodies and sexuality as arguably the primary battleground of patriarchal control of women. The familiar icon of artist Barbara Kruger’s work "my body is a battleground," and the slogan "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" reflect feminist resistance to male control of women’s bodies. Like women’s bodies and sexuality, women’s emotions are a warzone. While "keep your rosaries off my emotions" may seem trite or insignificant compared to the reality of abortion clinics being bombed, in fact women’s bodies and sexuality could not be policed without the parallel control of women’s emotions. Ann Ferguson (1991) describes these modes of production specific to capitalism in her analysis of "sex/affective production": the material production and reproduction of people involves modes of sexual and affective production, the body and psyche, alongside the material production of goods and capital.

A feminist politics of emotion examines specific strategies for women to "exorcize" the internalized effects of women’s subordinate status within patriarchal capitalist ideologies by means of developing alternative emotional responses, expressions, articulations, identities, and visions. Feminist pedagogies are designed to challenge women’s internalization of her subordinate status within patriarchal and capitalist culture, through alternative emotional responses, expressions, articulations and visions. In the words of one feminist educator, "[F]eeling helps us define what the world is like and how we want to change it....The exploration of feelings and experiences can help us define the basic arena for feminist theory and the basic direction for feminist action" (Fisher 1981: 20, 23).

Sandra Bartky opens her invaluable study of "Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness" (first published in 1976, in the midst of the second wave of feminism) by noting that

Dogmatic Marxists have regarded consciousness as a mere reflection of material conditions and therefore uninteresting as an object for study in and of itself. Even Marxists of a more humane cast of mind have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which the social and economic tensions they study are played out in the lives of concrete individuals. There is an anguished consciousness, an inner uncertainty and confusion which characterizes human subjectivity in periods of social change—and I shall contend that feminist consciousness, in large measure, is an anguished consciousness—of whose existence Marxist scholars seem largely unaware (1990:14).

The theme of "anguished consciousness" as indicative of the difficult paths to "freedom" is emphasized as well in the work of educational philosopher Maxine Greene. In an uncanny overlap, in nearly the same year as Bartky’s writing Greene writes "anguish is the way freedom reveals itself..." (Greene, 1973: 279).

Feminist theories and practices, I argue, "step up" to this difficult question of how material and economic oppression reveal themselves in our emotions and consciousness. What I call the feminist politics of emotion is a theory and practice which invites women to articulate and publicly name their emotions, and to critically and collectively analyze these emotions not as "natural," "private" occurrences but rather as reflecting learned hierarchies and gendered roles. The feminist practices of consciousness-raising and feminist pedagogy powerfully reclaimed emotions out of the (patriarchally enforced) private sphere and put emotions on the political and public map. Feminist politics of emotions recognize emotions not only as a site of social control, but of political resistance.

Numerous political movements have used consciousness-raising and a politicized discourse of emotions. During the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s the concept of "Black Pride" characterized a catalyzing emotion within the Civil Rights discourse. More recently, the lesbian and gay movement invokes similar discourses of pride. For the second wave of feminism which followed on the heels of the Civil Right movement, consciousness-raising arguably represented the central strategy. In an often-quoted statement Catherine MacKinnon writes in 1983: "Feminist method is consciousness-raising" (quoted in Lewis 1992: 177).

Feminist pedagogies refer to educational practices and theories that emerged out of the second wave of feminism, adapting consciousness-raising to higher education women’s studies classrooms in the 1970s and ‘80s. Since the 1970s feminist pedagogies have worked to actively shift the cultural ideologies and practices that maintain women’s oppression both within and outside of educational institutions. Viewing education as "taking place in the process of action," feminist pedagogies challenge traditional patriarchal definitions of knowledge and learning not only by teaching content areas of women’s studies but by materially changing the process of education. The commitment to process and action requires a radical rethinking of values and what counts as knowledge. Central to the reconceptualization of values and knowledge is an emphasis on the importance of women’s experience and emotions in particular as a barometer of both oppressive and liberatory experiences.

Feminist politics of emotion take place largely in social/educational spaces: women’s political groups, collectives, adult education, women’s educational work in prisons, and in classrooms from kindergartens to universities. This "political" discourse of emotion which emerges explicitly in the late 1960s systematically challenges the three other dominant Western discourses of emotion: the scientific/pathological; religious/romantic; and legislative/rational.

Consciousness-raising and feminist pedagogies viewed emotions not as "raw, unmediated data" but as starting point for critical inquiry. This critical view of emotions is present in early feminist pedagogy writings. Joan Cocks’ essay "Suspicious Pleasure: On Teaching Feminist Theory" (1985) offers a fair assessment of how feminist educational theories and practices reconceptualized the binary either/or of "emotion" vs. "intellectual rigor."

In her essay Cocks confesses her pleasure in theory, and examines student resistances to "theory" as if theory were inherently patriarchal and oppressive. Empathizing with her students she notes,

a reason divorced from desire, anger, and everything that is generally moving about the human world is bound to be derided by women, who have spent much of their time attending to emotional life.

Against both the dominant culture and its feminist critics, however, it must be argued that reason and emotion are not antagonistic opposites. Because emotions are felt does not mean there is no reason in them...If emotional experience has such an intimate connection to thought, there is no more subtle kind of conversation than that which analyses a particular social context, set of characters and events, in order to determine what passions were felt in a given situation and what passions were warranted or at least reasonable to feel under the circumstances (1985: 180).

These challenges are neither unique to "feminist pedagogies" not have they gone away despite many years of feminist theorizing.

The risks of an "untheorized consciousness-raising format" comes about for two key reasons: the difficulty of challenging another person’s claim to "experience;" and the related issues of identity politics. Diana Fuss addresses this insightfully in the last chapter of Essentially Speaking (1989). "Nowhere are the related issues of essence, identity, and experience so highly charged and so deeply politicized as they are in the classroom. Personal consciousness, individual oppressions, lived experience—in short, identity politics—operate in the classroom both to authorize and de-authorize speech" (1989: 113).

Fuss identifies two distinct problems: first, the issue of the privileged standpoint. ¹² "Does experience of oppression confer special jurisdiction over the right to speak about that oppression?" (1989: 113). Fuss examines the dynamics in which speaking of experience tends to "freeze" the discussion, because we dare not "question" the authority of one another’s experience. She writes, "While I remain convinced that appeals to the authority of experience rarely advance discussion and frequently provoke confusion (I am always struck by the way in which introductions of experiential truths into classroom debates dead-end the discussion), I also remain wary of any attempts to prohibit the introduction of personal histories into such discussion on the grounds that they have yet to be adequately ‘theorized’" (1989: 117).

The second problem is the question of an exclusionary position. Fuss explores the ways in which the authority of experience creates "insider" and "outsider" groups, can lead to a ranking of oppressions, and functions potentially to exclude in a potentially unproductive manner. She quotes Edward Said to make the point that it is "dangerous and misleading to base an identity politics on...‘exclusions that stipulate, for instance, only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience’" (1989: 115). Yet, a decade later, educators and feminist theorists have not resolved this tension surrounding the "authority of experience."

The most promising approach¹⁴ is the insistence on historicizing experience.¹⁵ Joan Scott (1991) has persuasively argued that a simplistic invocation of experience as uncontestable evidence in fact denies us the possibility of developing histories of difference. However, I believe we can develop strategies that don’t assume experience as authoritative or inherently "real" or "true;" we can introduce analytical approaches that frame emotional experience as a "window" into ideology. CR and feminist pedagogies deserve credit as among the first to approach this through an analysis of gendered oppression and resistance as embedded in emotions. This approach "permits the introduction of narratives of lived experience into the classroom while at the same time challenging us to examine collectively the central role social and historical practices play in shaping and producing these narratives" (Fuss 1989: 118).¹⁶

Deceptive binaries between theory and experience continue to force feminist teachers to feel they must choose to be either a "nurturing mother" or "castrating theory-bitch."¹⁷ The riskiest business—politically, theoretically, and practically—is to theorize and integrate both experience and theory.

During the last two decades it is arguably feminist scholars in philosophy,¹⁸ sociology,¹⁹ political theory,²⁰ and anthropology,²¹ who have articulated the most nuanced historical and culturally-informed theories of emotion. It is striking that rarely, if ever, do any of these feminist theories of emotion reference the pioneering work of feminist educators. It is my hope that feminist philosophers can recognize the historical significance of feminist educators’ politicization of emotions, and that similarly feminist educational theories (which tend to rely on poststructuralism and psychoanalysis) can recognize the importance of recent feminist philosophies for theorizing emotions and education. I turn to two feminist philosophical works which inform a conversation relevant to educational contexts.

The work of Sandra Bartky and Sue Campbell complexifies "experience" and "emotions" by situating them within collaborative social contexts that cannot be reduced to either individualized expressions of emotion, nor to simply rational/irrational experiences. Developing an invaluable feminist critique of the unaddressed dimension of psychological oppression within left social theories, political philosopher Sandra Bartky (1979/ 1990)²² critiques the Marxist explanation of ideology.²³ She demonstrates that women’s experience of "shame" (to her, a synonym for "low self-esteem") reflects an emotion that is neither rational nor irrational. Given the now-dominant ideology of the equality of men and women, shame does not reflect a "rational" effect of ideology. Yet, neither is shame irrational. Rather, Bartky describes women’s belief in their unworthiness as "engendered attunements." In her study of shame and gender Bartky challenges the conceptual theory of emotion, arguing that the language of rationality is at least an impoverished if not inadequate way to assess emotions. Bartky’s analysis provides a notable exception from other feminist theories of emotion in her analysis of the classroom context. When handing in papers, her mature female students’ demeanor and words consistently expressed shame over their work. She writes, "My students felt inadequate without really believing themselves to be inadequate in the salient respects: They sense something inferior about themselves without believing themselves to be generally inferior at all" (93).

Bartky concludes,

In sum, then, the ‘feelings’ and ‘sensings’ that go to make up women’s shame ... do not reach a state of clarity we can dignify as belief. [Nonetheless] they are profoundly disclosive of women’s "being-in-the-world," far more so than many of the fully formed beliefs women hold...such as...that they enjoy like men "equality of opportunity" or that school and workplace is meritocratic in character. What gets grasped in the having of such feelings is nothing less than women’s subordinate status in a hierarchy of gender, their situation not in ideology but in the social formation as it is actually constituted (95, emphasis added).

Bartky is critiquing the limits of "ideology" as an explanation for women’s contradictory self-perceptions. But neither does she invoke a theory of the unconscious. Rather, her description evokes what I call "lability." She points out that the rhetoric of equality that is now part of dominant ideology does not account for women’s shame; that shame is constituted through social formation. Yet she also refutes analytic and conceptual philosophical theories of emotion, showing that they cannot account for shame’s persistence: even if there is no evidence on which to found a belief that I am inferior, I can feel ashamed. Most importantly for a political theory of emotions, she demonstrates that shame is not an idiosyncratic or an individualized phenomenon, but is socially formed.

Sue Campbell’s essay, "Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression," (1994)²⁵ builds on recent feminist philosophical analyses of bitterness. Some feminists have reclaimed bitterness as a "legitimate and rational" response to injustice or oppression.²⁶ Campbell critiques this rationalist language, and points out that to argue that the bitter person has "legitimate and rational reasons" for her feeling thrusts the "burden of justification" onto the bitter individual. As an alternative to this reinscription of the rational individual, Campbell demonstrates how bitterness is collaboratively formed. It’s not that you knew you felt bitter, and then happened to decide to express it. Rather, you expressed your anger and were told "You’re just bitter." Once accused of bitterness, you must justify your reasons. Further, to be told "you’re bitter" is a dismissal and a silencing. Even if you then articulate your reasons for being bitter the other is no longer listening. If instead we recognize that bitterness is collaboratively and publicly formed, it does not make sense to require the bitter individual to justify her reasons. Rather, what is called for is a full social accountability on everyone’s part for the interpretive context. Like Bartky, Campbell elaborates a framework that does not rely simply on a rational/irrational evaluation of emotions, but rather understands emotional expressions as concretely situated particular historical relationships. Further, an emotional experience is not simply reflective of one’s individualized experience but rather reflects the interactive dynamics of power between persons.

Building on Marilyn Frye’s concept of "social uptake," Campbell analyzes the "blocking" or "dismissal" of emotions. These are instances in which those with greater power enforce the culturally-condoned habits of inattention. "’Social uptake’ is defined as necessary to the success of emotions" (1994, p. 480). Social uptake refers for example to a woman who gets angry watching her mechanic mess up the successful adjustment she herself had made to her carburetor. When she expresses her anger he calls her a "crazy bitch" and changes the subject. Not only does he refuse to "uptake" her anger, but he displaces it and frames her as crazy. Her emotional expression is successfully "blocked" through this social interaction. However, in a system which privileges rationality and language, such affective attunements can easily be dismissed and ignored.

The examples offered by Bartky and Campbell exemplify affective social interactions and expressions. These need not be explained through recourse to an individual unconscious; the interaction between the woman and her mechanic demonstrates affect traced in voice, intensity, gestures, and body. Neither can women’s shame be adequately explained in a rational discourse that founds existential and Marxist accounts.

In conclusion, these feminist theorizations of the collaboratively-constituted nature of emotions, formed through processes not readily characterized as either rational or irrational, offer elaborated directions useful to theorizing feminist educational practices and politics. Feminist educators can draw more centrally on work like that of Bartky’s and Campbell’s as we struggle to invite women’s expressions of emotions in classrooms while still challenging these articulations and theorizing these emotions in a critical framework. But in turn, feminist philosophers need to consider the political implications of their theories for educational work as well as credit the bold risks pioneered by feminist pedagogies and CR practices. Unapologetically, feminist pedagogies mobilize social transformation through accountability to "real" world of classroom politics, and understand that power is enacted in the most private of spheres—our "interior" self, or the supposedly "safe" relationship between colleagues or between student and her feminist teacher. The personal is still political, and until the social theorists of the millennium undertake a politics of emotion, we will continue to be stymied in our radical attempts to challenge dominant ideologies.

1. Women have of course challenged patriarchal privileging of reason over emotion for centuries. For earlier examples of critiques of women, reason, and emotion, see for example Denise Riley’s Am I That Name? (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1988) which offers excellent historical examples of women’s articulated critiques of her relegation to the sentimental sphere. Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own also offers an outstanding example of a modern feminist analysis of the politics of emotion.

2. A division even exists between feminist theories of education, and feminist pedagogies: for example, even very promising recent feminist poststructural analyses of education never refer to the legacy of feminist pedagogies or CR. For feminist poststructural treatments of education, see for example Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review 59:3, 1989; Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (NY: Routledge, 1991); Mary Leach and Megan Boler, "Gilles Deleuze: Practicing Education Through Flight and Gossip," in Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education, ed. Michael Peters, (NY: Bergin and Garvey, 1998).

3. This essay is a very abbreviated discussion representing one strand explored in my forthcoming book Feeling Power: Emotions in Education (Routledge, 1999).

4. Critiques of rationality, which emerge strongly within feminist and poststructuralist contexts, are articulated in response to different philosophical legacies and frequently directed at concepts of Cartesian ego or Kantian reason. The narratives that empower this thinking self are critiqued as disembodied, universal, and autonomous, falsely divorced from social or political influence. In the area of feminist philosophies, see for example Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (NY: Routledge, 1993); Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

5. I am grateful to Kathryn Pauly Morgan for drawing this article to my attention.

6. It would be worthwhile to locate the documents and programs of Vision 2000 to evaluate the scope and intentions.

7. This essay is one in a special issue of the journal Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 6(1) published in 1993 titled "Feminist Pedagogy and Performance." Both the currency of CR and the problems associated with CR are addressed within this collection.

8. In the aforementioned longer version of this discussion (Boler 1999), I address the phenomenon of Freire’s work being heroized while CR is "bashed." See also Boler, "Posing Feminist Questions to Freire," in Peter Roberts, ed., Paolo Freire and Education: Voices from New Zealand, Auckland: Dunmore Press, forthcoming 1999).

9. It is beyond the scope of this abbreviated essay to elaborate the complex relations between emotion and cognition. Because I am interested to understand emotions as they are embedded in culture and ideology, as "embodied and situated," an inclusive definition is useful as a launching point. Emotions are in part sensational, or physiological: consisting of the actual feeling—increased heartbeat, adrenaline, etc. Emotions are also "cognitive," or "conceptual," shaped by our beliefs and perceptions. There is as well a powerful linguistic dimension to our emotional awareness, attributions of meanings, and interpretations. My own philosophical conception of emotions is resonant with cognitive accounts of emotion that understand emotions and cognition as inextricably linked. My view is also resonant with evaluative theories of emotion, that understand emotions as moral evaluations or judgments and thus central to our ethical reasoning. I am also strongly compelled by theories of affect, developed in Spinoza’s philosophy, in the work of Gilles Deleuze (op cit., 1987), and the overlap of these accounts with psychoanalytic object relations theory (see for example Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, NY: Basic Books, 1985). Particularly useful for this direction is the contemporary work of Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," in Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) and in the same collection Moira Gatens, "Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power". I explore the implications of some of these philosophies in Leach and Boler (1998); and in an essay titled "Affecting Assemblages: Towards a Feminist Theory of Emotion," delivered at "Deleuze: A Symposium," The University of Western Australia, Perth, December 6, 1996.

10. Teacher as Stranger. CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc.

11. On CR see for example Catherine Mackinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). On feminist pedagogies there are two key anthologies: Learning Our Way: Essays on Feminist Education, eds. Charlotte Bunch and Sandra Pollack, Crossing Press 1983; and Gendered Subjects, eds. Culley and Portuges.

12. I address these discourses at length in "Disciplined Emotions: Philosophies of Educated Feelings," Educational Theory, 47(3): 203-227, 1997.

13. I am grateful to Kathryn Pauly Morgan for her comments on this. For further discussion of feminist standpoint theory, see for example Harding and Hintikka (op. cit., 1983); Alcoff and Potter (op.cit., 1993).

14. In the 1990s one finds an increased emphasis on "politicized narrative theory." One might date this for example to Barbara Christian’s catalyzing essay "The Race for Theory" in which criticizes the academic definitions of what counts as theory, and explores alternative modes of theorizing articulated by women of color. See also Lugones; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman/Native/Other (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).

15. One of the best readings I know of to assign particularly to white students reluctant to take responsibility for their "positionality" is Minnie Bruce Pratt’s essay "Identity: Blood/Skin/Heart," the account of "coming to consciousness" through a critical historical analysis of her own experience growing up in the South. In Yours in Struggle, eds. Bulkin et al, (NY: Long Haul Press, 1984). On the shortcomings of empathy as a pedagogical strategy for social change see Boler, "The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze," Cultural Studies 11(2): 253-273, 1997.

16. Her remarks, along with Gayatri Spivak’s advocation of "strategic essentialism" (the occasional, political necessity of claiming an "essential" identity even if one wishes, in the long run, to problematize the idea of a singular, essential identity) are frequently referenced in the 1993 feminist pedagogy issue of Women and Performance.

17. I do not have time to explore as well the extent to which these accusations are related to social class divisions. For example, part of the reason for accusing feminist pedagogies of being "touchy-feelie" is that often such methods as CR are used in community college women’s studies classrooms. In research universities, the admonitions against "touchy-feelie" work are stronger, and hence there appears be an issue of social class discrimination overlaid on these questions.

18. In addition to the feminist philosophies mentioned in an earlier footnote, there are many women philosophers who approach emotions within the analytic tradition, less informed by feminist theories of difference and who elect to publish less under the rubric of "feminist" philosophy (e.g., Hypatia: Journal of Women and Philosophy, and collections such as Feminist Ethics, op. cit.). Their work has been widely influential in putting emotions back on philosophy’s map in provocative ways. See for example: in the collection Identity, Character, and Morality eds. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Rorty (Cambridge: MIT, 1990) see Barbara Herman on Kant; Annette Baier on Hume; Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: an inquiry into emotional justification (NY: Routledge, 1988); Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, "Explaining Emotions," in Explaining Emotions ed. A. Rorty (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980); Lorraine Code, "What is Natural About Epistemology Naturalized?" American Philosophical Quarterly, 33(1): 1-22, January 1996. Karen Jones, "Trust as an Affective Attitude," in Ethics 107(October 1996): 4-25.

19. See Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: the Commericalization of Human Feeling; (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic : a feminist sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987); Barbara Laslett, "Unfeeling Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of Sociology," Sociological Forum 5(3) 1990; Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe, Passionate Sociology (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

20. See footnote 3.

21. See especially Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).

22. Femininity and Domination (NY: Routledge, 1990).

23. Bartky’s framework is largely Heideggerian, and may be compatible with a version of structural Marxism and the work of Althusser. However, she valuably emphasizes the ways in which emotions are disclosive of one’s subjective attunement to the world. As noted in my earlier quotation from Bartky, she takes issue with Marxists’ tendency to ignore the centrality of emotions in theorizing consciousness.

24. The term "labile" is found in educational studies from the 1930s and in contemporary psychology and social work. "Labile" is defined by the OED in five central ways: (1) liable; prone to lapse. (2) liable to fall from innocence into error or sin. (3) slippery, unstable. (4) prone to undergo displacement. In its fifth definition, in reference to woodworking—as in a "labile construction material," it resonates with John Dewey’s description of mutable subjectivity as "plasticity." I analyze the promises of the term labile, and its use in relation to education and the mental hygiene movement earlier in this century, in Chapter Two of Feeling Power: Emotions and Education.

25. Hypatia 9(3): 46-65, 1994.