A Jury of Our Peers: Teaching and Learning in the Indiana Women's Prison

Susan Gubar; Anne Hedin

doi:10.2307/376674

College English Dec 1981

A Jury of Our Peers: Teaching and Learning in the Indiana Women's Prison

Susan Gubar ; Anne Hedin

Abstract

IT HAD BEEN A TYPICAL FEMINIST CONFERENCE in early March 1979, in Buffalo, New York, a kind of high-voltage pressurized capsule in which we enacted what we wrote about and discussed what we enacted. Only in this safe place, on this common ground, could we feel free enough to dramatize disputes that would, in turn, energize further insights: unfortunately, nationally visible star, in this case Dorothy Dinnerstein, was effectively silenced by her so-called commentator; three forty-minute papers were given in a session scheduled to last an hour; third-world women, now termed of color, were ostentatiously absent, to guilty dismay of organizers; a female psychoanalyst announced to an astonished audience that clitoris, which she called the woodchip, produced an insufficient orgasm until it set fire to real explosion or big bang in vagina; first of two male speakers strutted his stuff in a combative performance in which he chastised women scholars for hiding behind skirts of sisterhood in an effort to evade genuine intellectual competition; at a Last Supper that night, over spicy fried chicken wings, a specialty in Buffalo, one of only two extant American feminist Lacanians-understandably exasperated with all these difficulties-reacted by hitting other one with a crumpled cigarette package and calling her a bitch. Set heat of this hectic activity against polar expiation of Buffalo in winter. We were all desperately afraid, or so we repeatedly exclaimed to each other, of being stranded in Buffalo. It was during a hot ride in an overcrowded car, through freezing night rains, that feminist critic Annette Kolodny asked about our teaching in Indiana Women's Prison: she was especially curious about inmates' attitude toward feminism. As we recalled atmosphere of prison nights and realized their similarity to dramatic enactments at conference, we knew that she had articulated crucial question we had faced when we team-taught in prison two years earlier. For prison (no less than conference) had been a

Journal: College English
Published: 1981-12-01
DOI: 10.2307/376674
CompPile: Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access: Closed
Topics: teacher development gender and writing
Export: BibTeX RIS

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (0)

No references on file for this article.

CrossRef global citation count: 1 View in citation network → Build reading path →

A Jury of Our Peers: Teaching and Learning in the Indiana Women's Prison

Abstract

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

References (0)

Related Articles