I am going in to teach a Women and Lit. class today, and I was planning to start with Adichie’s “Danger of a single story” and segue into fairy tales, which is all well and good in normal times, but these are not normal times.
Trump and the Republicans are RIGHT NOW trying to defund Planned Parenthood and I normally try not to advocate for or against any particular politician in my classroom; I want those students with more conservative positions to feel like my class is a space where they can express their views and be respectfully heard, while we argue out the ideas in a fair and Socratic manner.
But that is going to be a difficult needle to thread this semester, trying to talk about women and literature while all of THIS is going on.
Not all people believe in abortion. They think its murder. Also, while some people believe in a woman’s right to choose, they don’t believe in late pregnancy terminations. There is a wide spectrum of what women believe in terms of reproductive rights. Removing some powers from Planned Parenthood does not necessarily constitute a travesty which you need to address as an educator as this is *your* opinion. You *can* keep politics out of the classroom to the extent you want if you keep that in mind at all times.
Going to be tricky to avoid when we read The Handmaid’s Tale, since pregnancy and abortion are at the center of that text. The personal is political, which is part of the point of having a women’s lit. class to begin with. There’s really no such thing as a non-political women’s lit. class, or there shouldn’t be. I have no desire to keep political concerns out of the classroom — that’s a lot of what the classroom is for, so we can examine and argue out these ideas, whatever the students’ positions. Just don’t want the semester to be swallowed up by current presidential nonsense.