'Mastering' theory: A paradox in women's studies classrooms?

Nevertheless, Women's Studies students still report gender specific anxiety about learning 'theory', and resist what they perceive as the masculinist style of most theorising, including feminist theorising. Some of these anxieties derive from patterns of collective interaction explicitly developed to enhance experiential learning that inadvertently inhibit abstract discussion. This paper documents two successive years of interventions into the negotiation of the ground rules for the feminist classroom that highlighted women's 'mastery' of theory as paradoxical.

The discussion shifts attention from individual learners and teachers to the issue of how to incorporate theoretical talk within a feminist ethics of care. I argue that feminists need to attend to how the paradox of mastery is collectively managed to create a classroom context in which both flexible learning and feminist theorising can be practically achieved.