On the Impossibility of (Some) Critical Pedagogies: Critical Positionalities within a Binary

Abstract

In teaching, our teacherly bodies are always available for the interpretation and evaluation of others. Indeed, it was a first lesson for many: entering the classroom the first time and feeling those eyes reading your performance of self, deciding what kind of class (and what kind of teacher) this experience was going to offer. However, our students' reading are never theirs alone— they are produced and made possible by larger ideological struggles that produce the possibilities and impossibilities of what they (and we) can conceive. These struggles, these systemic reiterated forms work to generate binaries that often deny the complicated identities that occupy our shared spaces. In this article, we chart out and enflesh the teacher's body, asking about the invisible bodies that these binaries exclude. In particular, we ask about sexualized bodies and the binaries that erase real opportunity for critically informed democratic pedagogy.