Please note that this material is only for use by those

registered on the course of study for which this digital copy

has been made.
All staff and students of goldsmiths are reminded that all material held in electronic
form is subject to copyright law. This digital copy has been made under the terms
and conditions laid down by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) licence. Further
details are available at http://he.cla.co.uk/.
This licence allows legitimate users to:

Access and download a copy

Print a copy

You may retain such copies after the end of the course, but its use is strictly limited to
yourself and cannot be given or loaned to any others.
All copies (including those held electronically) will include this copyright notice and
will be destroyed and/or deleted if and when required by Goldsmiths. No further
copying, storage or distribution (including by e-mail) is permitted without the
permission of the copyright holder.
The authors, artists and other visual creators have moral rights to the work and
neither staff nor students of goldsmiths may cause or permit the distortion, mutilation
or any other modification of the work, or any other derogatory treatment of it that
would be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author, etc.
This is a digital version of copyright material made under licence from the rights
holder and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Please refer to the original published
edition.
Course of Study:

SO71087A

Title:

Troubling agency and choice: A psychosocial analysis

of students negotiations of Black Feminist
intersectionality discourses in Womens Studies

Author:

Jessica Ringrose

Publisher:

Elsevier

eISSN:

1879-243X

Designated Person authorising scanning:

Rebecca Randall

Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264 278

www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Troubling agency and choice: A psychosocial analysis of students'

negotiations of Black Feminist intersectionality
discourses in Women's Studies
Jessica Ringrose
School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies, Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK, WC1H A0L

Introduction
After the crisis over racism in feminism in the late
70s and 80s, Black Feminism emerged as a key theoretical intervention for addressing issues of exclusion
and white centric logics in the second wave feminist
movement (Bhavnani, 2001; Carby, 1982; Smith, 1983).
Patricia Hill Collins, renowned US theorist of Black
Feminism, traces the genealogy of Black Feminism to
black woman sociologists from the 70s onwards, who
explored how intersections of race, class and gender as
major features of social organization shape Black women's experiences (1998: 116). According to Collins,
Black Feminism theorizes intersectionality (1998: 117):
As a heuristic device [that] references the ability of
social phenomena such as race, class, and gender to
mutually construct one another. One can use the
framework of intersectionality to think through social institutions, organizational structures, patterns of
social interactions and other social practices on all
levels of social organizationAfrican-American,
women for example, can be seenas a group that
occupies a distinctive social location within power
relations of intersectionality (1998: 205).
As Kimberl Crenshaw (1991: 1283) suggests:
Aiming to bring together the different aspects of an
otherwise divided sensibility, an intersectional
0277-5395/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2007.04.001

analysis argues that racial and sexual subordination

are mutually reinforcing, that black women are
commonly marginalized by a politics of race alone
or a politics of gender alone, and that a political
response to each form of subordination must at the
same time be a political response to both.
In the UK context Black Feminism although perhaps
less developed than in the US has taken similar
formations in exploring the intersections of race,
gender, class and other axes of identity such as religion,
ethnicity, language, sexuality and ability (Brah, 1996;
Mirza, 1992, 1997).
Interest in intersectional framings has been growing
ever since and there has been a veritable explosion of
output of scholarship on this theme recently (Brah &
Phoenix, 2004; Phoenix & Pattynama, 2006; YuvalDavis, 2006). There have been important developments in
Black Feminist intersectional analyses through translocational and transnational frameworks, which analyze
uneven, often unequal, and complex1 relationships
between women in diverse parts of the world (Anthias,
2002; Grewal & Kaplan, 2002). A recent survey of
literature also indicates the up take of intersectional
frameworks more generally in various disciplines beyond
feminist studies and sociology, from psychology to
European politics, and around specialist areas of research
such as health, counseling and sexuality (Bredstrm,
2006; Burman, 2003; Verloo, 2006). A body of literature
on methodologies for conducting intersectional research

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

is also now developing (Ludvig, 2006; McCall, 2005;

Prins, 2006). In my own area of research, education,
intersectionality is becoming a dominant framework,
with a greater number of researchers looking at multiple
variables of class, race and gender in issues like educational attainment, inclusion and exclusion in schooling
and higher education (Archer & Yamashita, 2003; Dei,
1996; Gillborn & Mirza, 2000; Lucey, 2001; Phoenix,
2001, 2004; Rattansi, 1999; Reay, 2004; Reay, David, &
Ball, 2005; Ringrose & Epstein, in press; Youdell, 2006).
My interest in intersectionality in this article is from
an educational and pedagogical perspective and specifically in how Black Feminist intersectional frameworks
operate as a pedagogical heuristic device, as noted by
Collins (1998) that sets in motion complex discourses in
feminist higher education. I am interested in how students engage with these discursive complexities. Debate
in this area has raised questions about the uses to which
intersectionality has been put and the limitations of the
approach within feminist education and research. Black
Feminist scholars have suggested intersectionality is
being used in feminist educational spaces, in ways that
water down the approach and relativize, individualize
and liberalize issues of oppression and power (Collins,
1998). Some critics consider whether intersectionality is
an advance over gender-only approaches (Cealey Harrison & Hood-Williams, 1998). Others like Becky Francis
note Black Feminist and intersectional approaches can
be too divisive and fixed, entrenching dualisms and
refusing choice and agency, questioning whether the
approach is tenable to an emancipatory feminist politics (Francis, 2001a,b).
I am interested in these debates over how intersectionality plays out in feminist education. Specifically
I wish to explore the issue of how we can theorize
processes of subjective and social change set in motion
through intersectional perspectives. As part of my examination, I look at how agency is taken up in some of the
debate on intersectionality in problematic ways, and I
challenge the ideas of rationality, and will-full choice
that can inhere in the concept of agency. I also suggest
the concept of agency might foreclose our ability to
understand how subjects confront multiple axes of
power and difference (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 203). I hope
to contribute to this debate on intersectionality by exploring how subjects might change how they think
through a complex process of negotiating multiple and
contradictory discourses and navigating psychical conflicts enlivened through their engagements with Black
Feminist intersectional curriculum.
I explore these issues through findings from my PhD
research study, which focused on student interaction and

265

talk in seminar groups in an undergraduate Women's

Studies course, where Black Feminist intersectional
writings (Collins, 1998) were debated. I adopted a poststructural analysis to actually map how discursive contradictions play out as students engage with intersectional frames. For example, students are constantly
negotiating competing investments in liberal feminist
discourses of women's rational choice to succeed and
achieve gender equality, and Black Feminist perspectives on structural racism and calls for race equality (see
also Bulbeck, 2001). My findings illustrate that Black
Feminism enables an important disruption of investments in individualism and choice through an intersectional approach that helps students' grapple with the
meanings of the non-intentionality of discourses and
structural power.
I also used psychoanalysis to consider how discursive
contradiction in the classroom often leads to intersubjective psychical conflicts, processes that operate far
outside the remit of rationality and will-full consciousness (Britzman, 1998; Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn,
& Walkerdine, 1984/2002; Pitt, 1998). Using what has
now been coined a psycho-social approach, which
combines post-structuralism and psychoanalysis (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody,
2001), I will suggest these intersubjective conflicts over
such issues are what can act as a catalyst to complexity in
thinking, enabling students to shift their investments in
dominant/oppressive discourses and to reflect on their
own complex, multiple positionings. Through my data
analysis, I analyze moments of shock, contradiction and
conflict over competing discourses suggesting it is such
dynamics that afford the psychical spaces of realization
that lead to intersubjective and subjective change. I
illustrate how subjective shifts are therefore mostly not
about consciously desiring or choosing to change the
self, and indeed how strong investments in feminist
pedagogical discourses of consciousness-raising which
can conflate individual choice as the primary means of
change can hinder an understanding of discursive and/or
structural power and differences, impeding the difficult
and painful work of learning. My conclusions point to the
continued value of Black Feminist and intersectional
curriculum as a pedagogical resource for engaging with
multiple and hierarchical differences and finding shared
understandings and visions that move feminist education
and politics forward.
The study
My PhD thesis was a qualitative study of how
issues of race and racism were being addressed in the

266

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

curriculum and pedagogy of a Canadian School of

Women's Studies, one of the largest sites of institutionalized feminism in North America. In this programme and others, internationally, Black Feminism
has been incorporated into the curriculum to address
anti-racist and post-colonial critiques of white, middleclass feminisms (Bhavnani, 1993; Dua & Robertson,
1999; Maynard, 1996). As part of my PhD field work I
studied an undergraduate course on women's diversity, an upper level seminar and discussion style
classroom with 25 students. Black Feminism was
integral to the course, described in the syllabus as
having an emphasis on intersections of class, race,
gender and sexual identity to increase appreciation
of the complexity of issues related to gender race and
class as interacting social structure and lived experiences within a Western context. The main curricular
vehicle through which Black Feminism was introduced was Patricia Hill Collin's most recent text at
that time, Fighting Words: Black Women & the Search
for Justice (1998).
My goal in this classroom component of the study
was to focus on students' experiences of feminist antiracist curriculum, and their processes of negotiating the
discourses circulating in the classroom, a strategy that
came out of several related concerns. While theoretical
tensions between feminisms have been explored theoretically in great detail over the past couple of decades (see
Bhavnani, 2001; Weedon, 1999 for reviews of feminist
engagements with race and difference) there has been
far less consideration of the lived experiences and
effects for students in Women's Studies (Bignell, 1996).
This is particularly so when perspectives like Black
Feminism are brought in to challenge the more liberal,
white, middle-class platforms of feminist education that
ground a great deal of feminist and gender studies
curriculum (Bhopal, 2002). Most pedagogical research
focused on problems in implementing feminist, antiracist education in Canada has discussed difficult experiences of teaching this material to resistant or defensive
students, a position which usually neglects the subjective complexities of students (Bannerji, 1995; Dua &
Lawrence, 2000; Dua & Robertson, 1999; Ng, 1995). In
addition, most research on resistant students has focused
on white students responses to anti-racist pedagogies,
ironically re-centering the white pedagogical subject of
Women's Studies (Carillo Rowe, 2000; See Morley,
1992). Moreover, most investigations of students'
experiences in feminist pedagogical research have
come out of research where the researcher was also
the pedagogue. This has obvious limitations in terms of
research strategy and power dynamics for what students

will feel comfortable to discuss if they are interviewed

(although interview research with students is also rare in
this literature). (see Dua & Lawrence, 2000).
To focus on the experiences of diverse students in
Women's Studies I took the role of observer as participant whom the students agreed to allow observe and
record each of the classes (Hammersley & Atkinson,
1995).2 I drew on a strategy of methodological triangulation using extensive observations during the course
and analysis of engagements with curriculum, as a basis
for two stages of interviews with students' once mid
way through the course and once some months after the
course (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Seidman, 1998). I
spent a great deal of time tracing larger class and smaller
group work, and how discussion played out between
students and was negotiated by them.
Larger class discussion, small group discussions and
the two stages of interviews were both audio-taped, then
transcribed. My intention was that tracing students
engagements through multiple mediums (observations
of various formats and interviewing more than once)
over time would help to gauge shifting processes of
subjective engagements all part of an on-going pedagogical process that continues long after the time of
the classroom.3 To trace shifts, I analyzed my data
psycho-socially to gauge the discursive and psychical
effects of students' engagements with Black Feminist
curriculum over time to think about how subjective and
therefore social change might occur (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). Before I look at how I analyzed my data and
my research findings, however, I want to review some
recent debates over intersectional and Black Feminist
approaches.
Some feminist critiques of intersectionality
The Black Feminist scholars who pioneered the concept of intersectionality are becoming increasingly
concerned about how intersectionality theory is used in
both feminist politics and education. Collins (1998)
argues that intersectionality is increasingly used as a
heuristic device by feminist scholars in ways that equalize and relativize experience, calling into grave question the uses to which intersectionality can be put:
Although this approach is valid as a heuristic device,
treating race, class and gender as if their intersection
produces equivalent results for all oppressed groups
obscures differences in how race, class, and gender
are hierarchically organized, as well as the differential effects of intersecting systems of power on
diverse groups of people (1998: 211).

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

Collins (1998: 207) is concerned about the fluidity

accompanying intersectionality and a compatibility of
intersectionality with individual level analyses [that] can
foster the consequence of elevating individualism above
group analyses to the point where group and structural
analyses remain relegated to the background [which]
has close ties to American liberalism. Collins points out
that individualism is a logic where race, class, gender
and the like become defined as personal attributes of
individuals that they should be able to choose or reject
arguing, because it fails to challenge the assumptions
of individualism, intersectionality when applied to the
individual level can coexist quite nicely with both
traditional liberalism and a seemingly apolitical postmodernism obscur[ing] hierarchical power relations
of all sorts Collins (1998: 207, emphasis added). For
Collins, Black Feminism is consistently undermined
due to an academic feminist. emphasis on individualism, individual subjectivity and personal advocacy
implied in the politics of postmodernism[which] saps
Black Feminism of its critical edge as a group-based
critical social theory Collins (1998: 68). Collins'
concerns over the individualizing, equalizing, relativizing and neutralizing potential of intersectionality and
ideas about choice are well warranted, particularly in a
globalized political arena where neo-liberal discourses
of individualism, rational choice and personal freedoms offer a hegemonic framing for self-hood (Rose,
1989).
Sociologists of gender have critiqued intersectional
analysis in ways that seem at first to resonate with Collins.
Wendy Cealey Harrison and John Hood-Williams (1998:
2) cite problems of the limitless permutations of oppressions that can be generated in intersectionality theory.
But instead of examining how it is that intersectionality
becomes generalized and relativized, these critics advocate actually dispensing with intersectionality because it
has not provided workable alternatives to the privileging of gender-alone analyses (Cealey Harrison &
Hood-Williams, 1998: 2). This position resonates with a
great deal of feminist concern over the destabilization of
feminism in the wake of difference, signalling a retreat to
a more comfortable line of analysis (Gordon, 1991;
Luhmann, Braithwaite, Heald, & Rosenberg, 2004).
I find the desire to return to gender-only analysis
problematic, and can read as a reactive response to
decades of post-colonial, anti-racist and class-based
critiques of feminisms' exclusionary epistemological
bases, and the unmarked feminine subject/object of
(emancipatory) change (Carrillo Rowe, 2000). Frankenburg and Mani (2001: 488) call this sort of response
over how to analyze the relationship between the

267

multiple axes of oppression a neo-rear-guard' tendency especially by white feminists, to reabsorb notions of multiply determined subjectivity under the
single mistress narrative of gender domination. Gender sameness is re-constituted as the primary ontological
basis of a feminist movement to emancipate the
unmarked category of woman (de Lauretis, 1986).
Decades of critique and identity politics have pointed
out that this formula actually invokes a form of symbolic
violence by repeatedly denying difference (Brah,
1996; Spivak, 1988).
Feminist educational researchers have also engaged
with the notion of intersectionality, suggesting quite
usefully that both the relativism and the potential determinism of fixed intersections in intersectional
approaches are problematic (Archer, 2005; Francis,
2001a). Becky Francis suggests Black Feminist theories
that foreground material differences and say we
cannot share experiences hold significant, destabilizing consequences for emancipatory movements and
threaten to fragment all emancipatory allegiances concerning gender, race and so on (Francis, 2001b: 73;
Francis & Archer, 2004). Responding to this fear of
fragmentation of feminism vis--vis intersectionality,
Francis argues, however, thankfully we are not without
agency. We can choose to talk to, form relationships
with, and read about the experiences of people with
different material characteristics and it is our ability to
choose different discourses which enables us to go beyond our personal material realities and envisage the
world from other perspectives, enabling sympathy and
rapport. Francis (2001b: 73, 75).
Problematizing agency
I am interested in Francis' musings over how people
respond to an intersectional framing, which returns us to
the classical sociological dilemma between structural
determinism and subjective agency (Giddens, 1984) and
the question of whether post-structural approaches offer
a way forward out of these perennial difficulties. Francis
turns to Mills (1997) who
maintains that discourse is the vehicle through which
social relations are conducted, rather than being allpowerful in itself (as suggested in Foucault's conceptualisation). People are positioned in discourse,
but Mills maintains that this positioning is conducted
by other human beings (in their deployment of
discourse) rather than by discourses themselves. The
suggestion that people can actually choose the discourses which they draw on in order to deliberately

268

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

position others runs counter to post-structuralist positions. Jones (1997) has argued that the assumption
that we can choose which discourses to draw on is
based on a humanist conception of the self. However, if we recognise that as well as being able to
position ourselves and others through discourse we
are simultaneously being positioned by others, and
that such position is often beyond our control, this
perspective can incorporate both agency and determinism. (Mills in Francis, 2001a: 166)
I want to respond to the above quote at two levels.
First, my concern is that by referring to modernist
sociological framework of agency and determinism to
highlight how subjects position one another by drawing
on discourses, she minimizes the non-intentionality of
discourse, which was a key theoretical intervention of
Foucault (1982). Foucault made a very strong structural
argument that discourses are constitutive of subjects and
in some senses operate outside individual desires, because discourses are imbued with power and operate as
regimes and rationales that structure and constrain what
it is possible for the subject to know and desire (Paechter, 2001). I think a Foucauldian reading of discourses as
non-intentional lends weight to the to a Black Feminist
structural analysis of intersectionality, illustrating how
discourses constitute subjects relative to one another
through techniques of ordering, classification and governance (Rose, 1989).
I find agency, in particular, an over-determined concept, over-laden with condensed meanings (Hey, 2006)
and chains of signifiers (Walkerdine, 1991) that link the
concept repeatedly back to a discourse of personal
choice, itself embedded in modernist notions of consciousness, rationality, autonomy and will-full action
(Gill, 2006; Henriques et al., 1984/2002). In our current
political climate as noted by Collins (1998) and others, we
must be cautious of discourses that easily resonate with
neo-liberal discourses of choice and individualism
which are now hegemonic framings for understanding
the self and how the self might engage with education and
the social generally (Bulbeck, 2001; Fitzsimons, 2002).
Indeed, Francis' quote foregrounds a well known
pedagogical debate between Bronwyn Davies (1997)
and Alison Jones (1997) about problems encountered in
the classroom by continuously invoking a humanist
subject (a choosing agent) a problem that makes it seem
that we can have our cake and eat it too; we are both
constituted and yet can choose what we might be constituted as (Jones, 1997: 266). I have encountered
similar problems to Jones' (1997), Collins (1998) and
also Chilla Bulbeck (2001) who relates the difficulties

students have in grasping structures because of continuous, unremitting recourse to discourses of choice in
the classroom.
Second, the notion of agency is particularly problematic for me in the above passages as a way of explaining
how intersectionality is taken up among subjects and
how subjective negotiations of discourses might work
(Walkerdine et al., 2001). I am unsure what agency means
above, because it is unqualified. I find the concept of
agency limiting for fleshing out the dynamics of how
subjects negotiate the complex, contradictory discourses
set in motion in the classroom through intersectional
frameworks and for thinking about how subjects might
shift investments in discourses in often unintended and
surprising ways, as I explore below (Henriques et al.,
1984/2002).
I want to build on Francis's theoretical discussion of
how discursive positioning operates, by examining how
subjects negotiate the complex discourses set in motion
by intersectional frames at the level of classroom
practice. My goal is not to do away with the concept
of agency, or offer a new totalizing theory of social and
subjective formation, I hope only to elaborate on we
might mean by agentic processes by examining the
twists and turns of (inter)subjective engagements with
discourses in feminist pedagogical contexts.
My data indicates Black Feminism is so vital for
Women's Studies because it troubles choice indicating
how multiple discourses intersect to position subjects independent of intentionality, enabling students to gain
radical new insights into unequal power relations
(Foucault, 1982). As Yuval-Davis (2006: 203) suggests
drawing on Castoriadis (1997) intersectionality enables
the studying of relationships between positionings,
identities and political values evoking creative imagination about social divisions and social power axes.
I found it was only from this vantage point, when the
notion of individual choice came into contradiction with
expressions of how structural determinants (of gender,
race and class) were bearing down on subjects that
creative realizations and understandings of racialized and
classed differences among women were possible, particularly for white students in the classroom, as I will
explore.
A psycho-social analytic framing of discursive
contradiction
Critical psychologist Henriques et al. (1984/2002)
have also theorized the importance of addressing the
problems of the dualisms in a sociological theory of
structural derterminism that pits discursive interpellation

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

or subjectification (Althusser, 1971) against a notion of

conscious, rational agency (see Giddens, 1984). As
noted by Brah and Phoenix (2004: 82) the concept of
agency was substantially refigured through poststructuralist appropriations of psychoanalysis [as] new
theories of subjectivity attempted to take account of
psychical and emotional life without recourse to the idea
of an inner/outer divide. Henriques et al. (1984/2002)
develop a theoretical lexicon using post-structuralism and
psychoanalysis to underscore the complex investments
of subjects in discourses, suggesting that these investments are not always chosen, conscious, will-full or
rational, but often irrational, partly unconscious and not
always under the control or intentionality of subjects. This
combining of post-structural and psychoanalytical understandings has contributed greatly to my own understanding, and appears to contribute to the debates outlined
above, offering tools that move away from the problematic dualisms of structure and agency, by complicating
what we mean by consciousness and desires and pointing
to dynamical, messy, contradictory positionings often
outside the remit of our own will and desires:
Consciousness changing is not accomplished by new
discourses replacing old ones. It is accomplished as
a result of the contradictions in our positions, desires
and practices and thus in our subjectivities which
result from the coexistence of the old and the new.
Every relation and every practice to some extent
articulates such contradictions and therefore is a site
of potential change as much as it is a site of reproduction (Henriques et al., 2002: 430431).
This theory applied to questions of pedagogy and
learning imply that discursive contradictions at the
multiple levels of the intersubjective (contradictions in
the space of pedagogical practice where subjects become positioned) and in internal processes (contradictions in subjective desires) can open spaces for learning
and change. I have found this research that emphasizes
discursive/subjective contradictions as a site of struggle
and therefore potential change very useful for analyzing
students' engagements with intersectional frameworks,
and rethinking what it might mean to change the self and
others.
I want to suggest it is impossible is to escape
(Francis, 2001a) or resolve what are mighty discursive
contradictions that manifest in our lived experiences
of identity that are mediated through intersecting axes of
race, class and gender (among others) made visible to us
in intersectional framings (Smith, 1987). Perhaps it is
contradictions and subjects complex negotiations of

269

these that operate as a locus of potential change, an idea

with important pedagogical resonance (Felman, 1992).
Classroom conflict is never a simple straightforward
clash of discursive investments, but plays out in complex
ways, because fixity, heightened defensiveness and reinvestment in oppressive discourses is also possible
(Ringrose, 2004). As psycho-social researchers Frosh,
Phoenix, and Pattman (2000: 230) suggest in their analysis of masculinity and racism, beginning with contradictions in talk about racism is a good place to begin
exploring the movement of desires and anxieties that
can potentially signal subjective changes. For instance,
the display of a contradictory discursive positions(i.e. a
proclamation of being anti-racist, but expounding liberal
views where black people are blamed for being poor, in
ways that deny effects of racialization) once exposed in
the context of a classroom can create discomfort, pain and
difficulty for those whose contradictions are revealed.
Pedagogical theorists have suggested these various
forms of classroom conflict or crisis or trauma for
subjects might expose issues that have been repressed
(i.e. investments in racist logic), and occasion shifts in
thinking and awareness in the classroom (Berlak, 1999;
Felman, 1992). Psycho-social theorists point likewise to
moments of visible shift in subjects, where they might
suddenly realize their own privilege or victimization
(Mama, 1995). However, these shifts might not be conscious or obvious at the time or level of the classroom,
where disputes are staged and tempers flare (Ringrose,
2003). Psychical shifts can happen in complex ways that
are temporally differentiated and move backwards and
forwards through emotions and defenses (Britzman &
Pitt, 1996; Pitt, 2001; Ringrose, 2003, 2004). Using the
psycho-social approach (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000;
Walkerdine et al., 2001) helps build a multi-leveled
analysis tracing pedagogical dynamics and positionings
vis--vis specific discourses and shifts in subjective
investments (or lack of shifts) over time, and is a largely
novel approach in the pedagogical literature.
Drawing the line: Black Feminism and
positionality in the classroom
The first classroom sequence I look at involves a
discussion of Patricia Hill Collin's (1998) Black Feminist text Fighting words: Black women and the search
for justice. In the following extracts students' debate the
meanings of Black Feminism, epistemic authority and
positionality:
Tracy: My question is how can we be fightin' for
equality, for all we wanna be united and everything

270

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

and then we're gonna say Guess what? You can

come here but don't cross that line, you know? What
is feminism, Black Feminism? What purpose does it
serve if you stand over there and I stand over here
and do my thing? Like what differentiates
oppression as to Oh mine is worse than yours so
you can't write about mine, you don't understand,
I've got worse oppression than you. I mean how do
we differentiate that or why would we draw lines
there, and say oh you deal with your stuff?
Priscilla: I don't think a white woman can write
about how a black woman feels because she doesn't
know the experience of the black womanSuppose
there was a paper on black woman and a black
woman wrote it and a white woman wrote kind of
the same paper, there's gonna be a difference in
terms of the privilege and the power that the white
woman may have. That information is either gonna
be received interpreted in a different way, serve a
different purpose
Ramina: There are very few of us in university there
are many more black women and women of colour
out there and my question is how can we present our
views to have them on our side?

these ideas can be made accessible to Black women

outside the university, to which Maria, from a
Portuguese immigrant family responds with her own
reading of positionality as a matter of rhetorical staging.
We see how the theoretical meanings of positionality as
a social location of relative power and privilege are
glossed over by Maria who seems not to recognize how
her capacity to speak in a public space might be a
dimension of her white relational privilege (Bannerji,
1995), or that performing public anti-racist displays
would be likely to hold vastly different ramifications for
Black women than white women. Ramina tried to
explain some of this, saying:
But there are some situations where you can never
ever say what you want, or give the sort of analysis
that we have here in class, sometimes you're not in a
position, you can't deal with that
Katherine also responded:
One of the reasons why we have employment equity,
it's not what you've done personally, you can have the
nicest gestures, but you live a privileged life. You don't
have to worry when you go into a store that people are
following you. Those are things that you face everyday
as a minority. For me it's black and white.
To which Maria replied:

Maria: I just think from my own personal experience

with people from work or stuff I just start up a
conversation and say oh you know what somebody
said this in class what do you think about it? I work
in a really big company and I just throw stuff out. I
just bring it up and usually a conversation starts,
people have different opinions Patria Hill Collins
said in matters of war positioning is everything, and
it's so true about a touchy subject, if you position it
correctly you will spark up a conversation
In this complex discussion, Tracy, a recent immigrant
from the Caribbean asks a series of questions about
Black Feminism, picking up on typical feminist
concerns I've reviewed already, that it presents a threat
to a unified women's movement. Tracy's dialogue
works to relativize oppressions in ways Collin's and
others critique (see Anthias, 2002). She also raises key
epistemological questions about who holds the authority
to speak about experience (Luke, 1994). Priscilla, who is
also CaribbeanCanadian responds by raising issues of
privilege and power and the uses to which knowledge is
to be put, offering a more grounded Black Feminist
standpoint position (Collins, 1998). Ramina, who is
South-AsianCanadian, asks a question about how

I understand when you're a minority it's even

harder, but I think, at some point, you have to draw
the line because if you don't, you're a hypocrite.
Yes, I do have privileges coming with my skin, but
regardless of the ramifications, I mean I'm not rich, I
need my job, especially with a wedding coming up.
For me, as person, when I see you, I don't see you
black, I don't see you as white. I try to understand
where you're coming from. The colour? I try to keep
myself away from that. I think it's my responsibility
understanding that I'm privileged, to nip it in the
bud, if I lose my job over it, someday, which I'm
sure I will, but that's for me to deal with. I can go
elsewhere and get another job, but it's my
responsibility since I'm saying, no, racism is wrong
and you shouldn't do this and you should understand
people and be nice to each other regardless of all our
differences. If you're not going to go and make any
changes it's pointless.
Ramina and Katherine try to situate Maria's
relativism by articulating their everyday lived realities
of being black and white, Katherine, turning explicitly
to affirmative action policies (employment equity) to
make her point (Smith, 1987). Maria responds to the

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

issue of positionalities in power, privilege and speaking

by trying to suppress difference again through a
relativist, abstract, universalizing logic about everyone
needing to be responsible and nice, and implicating the
others as hypocrites, for not making anti-racist
changes. But that this line one is to draw around
racism is dependent upon who is drawing it, is negated
as she violently imposes her own experiences upon
others. Her desire to not see colour, to keep herself
away from that, reveals an investment in colour blind
discourses, where repressing race is what could do away
with racism (Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, 1995). We
are thus presented with a dramatic contradiction. Maria
claimed to understand her own privilege, meanwhile
negating the implications of her racial identity, presenting us with a take responsibility discourse that smacks
of individualism, equalizes experiences of racism, and
patronizes the racially marginalized students in the
classroom. Tracy and Katherine respond again:
Tracy: But it all depends, you speaking out and
having a voice, what you got to lose and what
position are you in to get that voice.
Katherine: When Maria said the word hypocrite
some people when they work its a matter of I'm
gonna pay my dues, educate my kids pay my rent go
to work and have some sort of mental health. I mean
statistics are saying that black males are suffering
with huge mental health issues and it is because of the
oppression that they face in the workplace cause if
you go out to Royal Road4 who do you think you're
gonna see? Like we're disproportionate there because
of the ways these issues take a toll
Tracy: Just to say though, I mean workin' in the
government they can't really discriminate on you
cause its based on an application system [students
laughing]. No I mean getting the job, you all have to
do a test and you all have to do a point system
interview systembecause they stress equity
[Loud conversation]
Tracy points out that one's position impacts their
ability to speak out in the workplace. But when Katherine
interjects to again highlight racism, with statistics that
black people are facing a greater toll from issues of
discrimination, Tracy argues that the government has
equity policies, around who is to be hired and fired. This is
a meritocratic logic, she is deeply invested in.
We could summarize that Maria holds investments in
discourses of cultural relativism and universalism that

271

are in direct contradiction with Black Feminist perspectives, which demands positioning the self vis--vis
concepts of power and privilege and standpoints of
knowledge (Collins, 1998; Smith, 1987). Tracy seems to
hold conflicting identifications with both discourses, she
disputes Maria's denial of social positioning, but is also
invested in meritocracy, which leads her to refute
Katherine's analysis of systemic (visible through social
statistics and equity policies) oppression. This exchange
is one of many similar conflicts followed by an even
more dramatic encounter in the next classroom scene.
However, this next exchange also indicates how
investments can shift through the pedagogical contestations in play.
Negotiating choice: Colliding discourses, shifting
investments
The second classroom sequence I want to look
happened near to the end of the course and foregrounds
the emotional strain of these debates and competing
investments, yet we also see how this emotional
intensity can lead to shifting attachments. This time
the conversation was about adoption and the provocative question should poor people be allowed to adopt,
which got taken up in the following ways:
Maria: I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for this,
but I don't think poor people should have children,
But what are we defining as poor? Are we saying
homeless? Because I consider myself poor, I'm by
no means a rich middle-class person. I come from a
family who struggles on a weekly basis to pay their
bills, and that's just my reality. I'm trying to be
politically correct here and I can't, so I'm just going
to come right out and say it what's in my head. I
think if you're homeless or in shelters and you're
having difficulty supporting yourselfI don't think
you should have children, period. I'm not saying that
you should be sterilized, that people should impose
that on you. But from my point of view there
should be a conscious choice. I know if I was
homeless there is no way I would let myself get
pregnant.
Reta: But if it happens, it happens! [Loud conversation]
Debbie: For me personally, to be impoverished like
that and have children, you're continuing that wheel. I
as an individual, as a woman, would not want to have
children grow up in that kind of society, and for that
reason I wouldn't as a poor person have children.

272

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

Both Maria and Debbie (a white Italian immigrant)

positioned pregnancy as a personal choice through a
(neo)-liberal feminist investment in sameness that
equalizes and relativizes experiences of having children
(Bryson, 1992). They use a functionalist argument
combined with individualism to suggest that poor people
reproduce a wheel of poverty, and also locate the
problem in poor people's choices. This is in dramatic
contradiction with Black Feminist models of structural
power which emphasize how hierarchies contribute to
people being positioned in groups and individually, and
these positions demarcate who receives resources, jobs
and social privileges. Reta, who was visibly pregnant,
responded in a low, strained voice:
Reta: I'm thinking of very poor people. They are
African. They are Aboriginal people. Maybe 80 percent of the world lives in dire poverty. I think they
have the right to have kids. I'm saying it sounds like
eugenics, where some people are allowed to have
kids if they are not disabled, if they are white, and if
they have moneyThis argument is very much like
in the abstract because anybody's whose a human
being wants the best for their kids, I don't think
people are going when I have a kid I'll be poor, I
think it doesn't happen that way. I cannot have this
discussion outside of the context of why do we have
a class society? Why should we not have a class
society to facilitate everybody having children if
they want to? I'm poor and I'm having another kid
because I want to and nobody has a right to stop me
from doing that. I'm in school and I have no money,
but I'm 36 and I'm not going to wait until I'm 45.
Tracy: I think that people have a right to make a
decision Who decides whether or not we should be
able to?
Katherine (yelling): Say I lost my house? I'm now
living on the street, I have no money to feed myself,
and I don't know where I'm going to sleep tonight,
but I love my kids and they love me and who says that
you're going to be better because you have food in
your house? You might be a murderer for all I know.
What is interesting here is how the Black women
oscillate between a structural discussion of racism and
classism and discourses of choice and rights. The black
women are also deeply invested in choice, but couch this
within the structural constraints of society to ask the
questions why should some be allowed to have children

who decides, whose a better parent. It would seem that

these contradictions and complexity with its extreme
emotional intensity opens a window of insight for Maria
for how such contradictions are operative in her own
psyche:
Look I agree with you, I don't want this to be law. You
guys have all made very valid points and you've made
me think, which is why I come to university. But
we're talking about the five basics. I mean food,
water, somewhere to sleep at night, whether or not
your kids are going to be raped. Those are necessities
those are what makes you a human being. My dad was
always, like, you take what you can handle and if you
can't handle it don't take it. I'll never forget this. One
day we were coming out of high school and it was
winter, a blizzard outside and I saw this man on Royal
Road, he had this sign, and it said: We are a homeless
family, with a wife and two little girls, and I thought
to myself, Why? I couldn't handle it and I thought
why did you do this? I know it's wrong because I was
blaming them for something like you said they had
no control, but for me personallyI don't enjoy
seeing it. I could never say this should be gone but I
don't agree with it. I don't like it.
The desire to once more repress hierarchical positions of power grounds Maria's story (Cheng, 2001). As
she recounted her horror at a scene of homelessness, we
see her deep investment in what is actually a deeply
working class, immigrant narrative of struggle, independence, autonomy and choice, as she drew on her
Portuguese father's adage you take what you can
handle. She does not read her own class into her narrative, however, indicating the intersectional analysis is
partial and still looking to the oppression in the other,
rather than the self, in large part (Dei, 1996). What we
also see, however, is that Maria was beginning to understand her memory and her resistance reflectively, saying,
I couldn't handle it, I know it's wrong, because I was
blaming them. Maria's shifting capacity to understand
the implications of her own investments in discourses of
choice and the surprise of social determination that lies
outside desires for control are evident.
A psychosocial perspective indicates that it is just
such moments of conflict enlivened through contradictions that enable shifting investments:
personal and social change occur in consonance, as
psychic and discursive events resonate with one
another. When such resonances occur they are
experienced as sudden flashes of insight, or as
primordial events which then reshape the subjectiv-

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

ity and experience of the individual. In this way we

are able to understand subjectivity non-dualistically,
as recursive rather than resulting from interactions
between two ostensibly separate levels of being
(Mama, 1995: 164).
Flashes of insight like Maria's are part of the
explosive pedagogical process of re-visioning the self
and others. In this case feminist desires for sameness as
women, and changing through the choice to be a better
person (Schick, 2000) as the basis for understanding and
emancipation are disrupted by realizations about
hierarchical difference and its experiential effects,
which are made visible in the intersectional framing.
For me this complicates how we understand agentic
processes involved in learning, and theorizing what is
involved in learning to think and act differently. The
conflicts set in motion over contradictory positionings
enable profound moments of awareness about our own
experiences vis--vis others, intersubjective processes
of change that reverberate long after the time of the
classroom, as I explore next (Benjamin, 1998).
Maria: Confronting difference
Maria was positioned in the classroom as resistant
and ignorant by the majority of students I interviewed.
Katherine, for instance remained extremely upset over
Maria's comments on parenting, which she revisited in
her interview:
I remember there was that one particular day when that
girl [Maria] was talking about how poor people
shouldn't have the right to have children and, you
know, [high-pitched voice] I don't care, people might
kill me for saying this. And I was thinking that far
along in a course that we're talking about diversities of
different people, like, why would you say that one
person has a right to have a child and another person
doesn't? I'm thinking haven't you learned anything?
What are you thinking? . . . It's a matter of fact that
there is white racism and that we don't all hold the
same power. You should have known that. [yelling]
Like, it's just a fact! It's not a debate, its not! Let's . . .
talk about how did this come to be? Where are we now
in this? We're not here to argue that poor people
shouldn't have children and why don't these black
women get a grip and chip on their shoulder
business. There should be no space for that.
These long ranging effects are difficult and traumatic,
yet they are powerfully transformative as well. While

273

Maria's first interview mid-way through the course was

largely a lament over the conflicts in the course, following such moments of rupture and insight I traced in
the classroom, Maria articulated her experiences of the
class in her second interview (months after the course
finished) quite differently:
In that class I felt like there was a distinct, almost
like a barrier between black [thumping the table] and
white This is how we see it. This is how we see
it. It made me realize that there is a difference in
thinking because your experiences are so different.
That class made me realize that, yah, I'm biased and
I do have opinions because of my background Yes,
I'm an immigrant and I've experienced a little bit of
limited racism, but nothing to the extent of being
black or being Asian or being Jewish. I will
probably, not probably, I will never fully understand
what it's like, but I guess what I was hoping in
taking this course was to get that other point of view
and I found that it's almost like ignorance is bliss. At
some points in that course I felt like I really didn't
want to hear that and I would shut it out, like I don't
agree with you, you're just wrong, that doesn't exist.
But that is a bias. That is you using your privilege
and rejecting that because you don't want to
recognize that you may be racist or you may be
biased. You want to think that, no, I really do care
about you guys and I really feel your pain. So when
some of the girls were saying, No, you can't
possibly understand, I'd be like don't tell me I
can't understand. But I really can't.
This confrontation with difference stems from
Maria's realization that she will never really understand racism. We see a self-analysis of how she had
wanted to shut out (repress) the other point of view
and a new capacity to position herself more ambiguously as positioned by multiple discourses as
experiencing some discrimination but also privilege.
This complexity operates as a sort of third space of
learning (Frosh, Burman, & Clements, 2006) and it is
partly about surmounting the fiction of choosing agent,
and balancing this with realizations of structural/cultural
determinants, which position women differently.
Through this awareness she had also come to grips
with the desire for total commonality as women (and
feeling shared pain) that is often cultivated in
Women's Studies, and which violently (in symbolic
ways) denies difference (Spivak, 1988; Young-Bruehl,
1996). In the context of feminist education this
recognition of the irreducibility of difference (Butler,
2004) represents the crucial site of discursive/psychical

274

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

shift for many white women, where gender-only,

gender-sameness investments are disrupted and complicated. I would like to suggest that this grappling with
difference (made possible through curricular inclusions
of Black Feminist intersectional models among other
theories of power and structures) does not threaten
emancipatory politics (Francis, 2001a). Rather, it sets
the ground for new, more ethical terms of relating across
differences through recognition of difference (in power
and privilege made visible in the intersectional approach) as well as gender sameness (fore-grounded in
traditional feminist approaches), which means we
cannot fully know another's experience; this forms a
new ground for humility, empathy and respect, discernable in Maria's reflections.
Tracy: All the ism that I face
Students like Tracy also emerged from the struggles
in the classroom with a very different set of analytical
tools for analyzing their experience as black women,
garnered through the Black Feminist intersectional
approaches. In her interview during the course Tracy
straddled investments in individualizing discourses of
rights and choice with an under-developed notion that
people's ability to speak was based on their position.
She also suggested that many of the black students had
made students like Maria feel like crap because they
just wanted to be right. Eight months after the course,
however, a dramatically different interpretation emerged
in light of several pivotal experiences for Tracy:
You see, daily, everyday practice and gender, race,
and class issues that we discussed in class actually
reflect back in mine, so it's sort of like a good thing
that I took the course because it made me more
knowledgeable of how to address certain issues as it
relates to women, racism, classism and everything.
Personally, I'm working full-time with the federal
government, not that it matters, [laughing] but it's just
full of racism, classism and all the ism that you can
get. I just took this class out of interest, but the
knowledge you gain in ithelp me dealing with issues
that arise at work. When it comes to all the ism that I
face working out there, being a black person, I
understand it better. I'm more alert. I can see it.
Normally you'd be wondering what is going on, but
now I'm able to know exactly what's going on.
Tracy recounts how the course armed her with
knowledge to know what's going on and went on to
give a very painful description of how her application to
be promoted from a temporary student position in the

Government to full time/permanent was turned back

despite her having higher educational qualifications than
many others who were selected for interviews. A
difficult struggle ensued where she had to formally
challenge the decision, which was eventually repealed
and Tracy granted an interview and later given a position,
but this proved little solace for Tracy:
Tracy: But then even though I'm offered the job
[shaky] you can still sense the feeling as how did you
get it? Why did you get it? If the course had not
expanded my knowledge I would be wondering why?
What's going on? But being in the course, and
understanding how a race is being each person
whether you're good or bad you're all classed in
one raceit made me able to quickly analyze the
situation and conclude that this is what's going on. I
was able to write a letter to address it in time before
they did all the interviews that they called. If I'd not
been in this course, not understand racism gender
really wasn't an issue, class and race was an issue and
how people view these things, then I wouldn't be able
to analyze it and address it quickly enough for a
decision to be made. The knowledge that I gained I
look at university education it's a powerful tool.
When you know you're right, it's a powerful tool.
Through this story the enormous shifts that have
happened from the classroom moments when Tracy
insisted on the presence of equity policies as protective
measures in the government, to the realization of
systemic oppression of race and class are evident. An
intersectional analysis proves crucial in differentiating
the role of race and class in her experience, and how a
gender-only liberal feminist perspective would prove
vastly inadequate for analyzing this situation. However,
there are also dangers in the add on formula of
intersectional frameworks, which allow Tracy to simply
separate her gender out from this scenario in problematic ways. The dangers of fixity and determinism raised
by Francis (2001a) in the wake of fixed intersections
analyses are also evident:
Tracy: like, back in the class I was looking from a
theoretical perspectiveBut when you take away
theory and put in reality and experience, you get a
whole different viewpointBut then when you get
out of the classroom and experience all these things
that are in the textbook you realize, Whoa, this thing
is bigger than I thought! When I was there I wanted
to make change, but now at this point I'm like,
Whatever, to hell with it. You got to expect it,
[slapping her hand against her knee] learn to live with

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

it. Ain't nothing you can do about it. Personally,

experience really changes, really makes a person, and
with my experience on the whole . . . [begins crying]
like, life is a struggle. It's a big struggle.
Jessica: Are you okay, do you want to stop?

275

might mean by agency, by indicating the complexities of

subjective negotiations of discourses, which mediates
processes of coming to think and act differently in the
world. These pedagogical narratives also indicate again
the profound importance of the conflictual dynamics that
are allowed to flourish in the spaces of feminist education
and which can provoke thinking differently.

Tracy: No, I'm okay.

Concluding remarks
Jessica: Okay, you're sure?
Tracy: And [very shaky] you constantly have to
fightLike, I hadn't experienced the whole classism
or racism, so maybe that's why I spoke freely in the
class, like, for me it was a working experience. I did
experience racism, one kid who called me nigger on
a train once, but it's a whole different thing when
you see your life [shaky] and you're entrenched in
the whole system and you can do nothing about it.
And with all the text book and you read and the
knowledge you gain and you go, Yes there can be
change, yes, we can all work together, yes, we can
all you know embrace each other's path. When
you're in the real world, where you are sitting in that
position where you are the victim of systemic
racism, where you are the one who's being placed in
a different group, you realize that this thing is really
bigger than you thought. I've been in Canada for ten
years but I've never experienced that systemic part
of it. I've experienced where just a single individual,
which I look at like this is just one person But with
my present experience, if this is happening, it's
happening to a lot more people. If I didn't know
what's going on and took the courage to address it in
a letterI would go through the door just like that.
Sites of contradiction are highlighted here between
feminist discourses based on women's sameness, that
advocate for embracing each other's path and enacting
libratory dreams of social change, and the crushing
realties of systemic/structural racism. This is a sobering
reminder for me of how structural/discursive determination is experienced. Rationales, logics and technologies of
control like racism operate both beyond and within
individual decisions to interview, hire or fire, and it is this
dynamical play of choice/determinism, intentional/unintentional, individual/structural with which Tracy grapples.
Tracy confronts these complex dynamics. These incite
despair, yet she also describes that she chooses to fight
offering a narrative about having the courage to
struggle against the system and her position. Once
again these pedagogical narratives complicate what we

For me, the ambiguous moments and oscillating

subjectivities I have mapped that emerge when students
are engaging with discursive multiplicities are part of
the process of learning to think differently. I feel the
complexities of this process cannot be read off of the
sociological concepts of agency and structure, and we
need to build a greater theoretical lexicon to describe the
difficulties and emotional intensities evoked when
grappling with the contradictory discourses set in
motion vis--vis the theoretical and heuristic device
of intersectional approaches. As I've illustrated, these
conflicts may act as catalysts for changing investments
and forging shared meanings across and through
differences. Through Maria and Tracy's narratives we
see that these psychical shifts are then carried out into
their everyday worlds and hold enormous potential for
enacting new political practices in manifold contexts of
life and work. These new understandings are also deeply
painful and anxiety provoking in ways that signal how
pedagogues need greater resources for understanding
and coping with difficulty (Britzman, 1998; Frosh et al.,
2006).
This exploration has been my attempt to contribute to
this understanding of pedagogical conflict and to add to
the burgeoning intersectional literature by fleshing out
some of the complexities of how intersectionality is
being engaged with at the level of the classroom by
students. Mapping students' experiences on the
ground, offers us insight into the complexities of how
gender, race and class are being practiced, negotiated
and lived in the classroom, contributing to the long
cherished political goal of feminist praxis in feminist
education (Bignell, 1996; Roman, 1993).
I have now shifted international location, institutional context and professional status, and teach gender
and education in higher education in London. I find the
resources offered through Black Feminist intersectional curriculum invaluable in my own teaching/learning
for helping myself and students to think through contexts of heightened neo-liberalism, post-feminist, postclass politics (Gill, 2006; Walkerdine & Ringrose,
2006); shifts in UK multiculturalism, which is quickly

276

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

transforming from a discourse of inclusion to assimilation; and weekly broadsheet controversies over issues
like Muslim girls and women and veiling, which place
issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, immigration (etc.) into a pressure cooker of dispute over women's
choice vs. cultural, sexual determinism. While this is
the topic of another article, the pedagogical resource of
Black Feminist intersectional approaches work once
again to help us grapple with the idea of discursive
positionings we struggle together to negotiate
contradictions between discourses of choice, which
evade a reading of structural determinism, and convictions that our actions can have enormous effects in the
world. The rupturing of choice, made manifest in
Black Feminist intersectional approaches (Collins,
1998), remains essential, however, for students to
grapple with the complex meanings of how power
differences in gender, race and class affect subjects' so
differently. It is this starting point that enables our
collective and subjective breakthroughs in learning.

Endnotes
1
Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices,
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/
jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm, Accessed, March 2005.
2
I was introduced as a postgraduate student, and my student status
afforded me important opportunities to accompany students into
separate discussion groups and after-class study sessions.
3
Eighteen out of 23 students in the course were interviewed once,
and 13 of these were interviewed a second time after the course was
completed. The students were a highly ethnically diverse group, 13
were women of colour; of these, 5 identified as African-Canadian and
6 as Caribbean-Canadian, and 2 identified as South Asian-Canadian.
The rest of the women identified as white, although three of these
women qualified their identity as Portuguese, Italian and Hawaiian; finally there was one man, who identified as African-Canadian. I
have explored the issues and dynamics involved with my own identity
as a white woman PhD student and researcher in Womens Studies in
great depth elsewhere (please see Ringrose, 2002, 2003, 2004).
4
This is a highly marginalized area of the city associated with
prostitution and homelessness.

References
Althusser, Louis (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Anthias, Floya (2002). Beyond feminism and multiculturalism:
Locating difference and the politics of location. Women's Studies
International Forum, 25(3), 275286.
Archer, Louise (2005). Re/theorising difference" in feminist
research'. Womens Studies International Forum, 27, 459473.
Archer, Louise, & Yamashita, Hiromi (2003). Theorising inner city
masculinities: Race, class and gender. Gender and Education, 15(2),
115132.

Bannerji, Himani (1995). Thinking through: Essays on feminism,

Marxism, and anti-racism. Toronto: Women's Press.
Benjamin, Jessica (1998). Shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and
gender in psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Berlak, Ann (1999). Teaching and testimony: Witnessing and bearing
witness to racisms in culturally diverse classrooms. Curriculum
Inquiry, 29(1), 99127.
Bhavnani, Kum Kum (1993). Talking racism and the editing of
Women's Studies. In Diane Richardson & Victoria Robinson
(Eds.), Introducing Women's Studies: Feminist theory and practice
(pp. 2748). London: Macmillan.
Bhavnani, Kum Kum (2001). Feminism and race. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bhopal, Kalwant (2002). Teaching Women's Studies: The effects of
race and gender. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 26
(2), 109118.
Bignell, Kelly Coate (1996). Building feminist praxis out of feminist
pedagogy: The importance of student perspectives. Women's
Studies International Forum, 19(3), 315325.
Brah, Avtar (1996). Cartographies of diaspora. London: Routledge.
Brah, Avtar, & Phoenix, Ann (2004). Ain't I a woman? Revisiting
intersectionality. Journal of International Women's Studies, 5(3),
7586.
Bredstrm, Anna (2006). Intersectionality: A challenge for feminist
HIV/AIDS research? European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(3),
229243.
Britzman, Deborah (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a
psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press.
Britzman, Deborah, & Pitt, Alice (1996). Pedagogy and transference:
Casting the past of learning into the presence of teaching. Theory
into Practice, 35(2), 117123.
Bryson, Valerie (1992). Feminist political theory: An introduction.
New York: Paragon House.
Bulbeck, Chilla (2001). Articulating structure and agency: How
Women's Studies students express their relationships with
feminism. Women's Studies International Forum, 24(2), 141156.
Burman, Erica (2003). From difference to intersectionality: Challenges
and resources. European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling
and Health, 6(4), 293308.
Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing gender. London: Routledge.
Carby, Hazel (1982). White women listen! Black Feminism and
boundaries of sisterhood. In Paul Gilroy (Ed.), The empire strikes
back (pp. 212235). London: Hutchinson.
Carrillo Rowe, Aimee (2000). Locating feminism's subject: The
paradox of white femininity and the struggle to forge feminist
alliances. Communication Theory, 10, 6480.
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997). The imaginary institutions of society.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cealey Harrison, Wendy, & Hood-Williams, John (1998). More
varieties than Heinz: Social categories and sociality in Humphries,
Hammersley and beyond. Social Research Online, 3(1).
Cheng, Ann A. (2001). The melancholy of race. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Coffey, Amanda, & Atkinson, Paul (1996). Making sense of
qualitative data: Complementary research strategies. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications.
Collins, Patricia Hill (1998). Fighting words: Black women and the
search for justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberle (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality,
identity, politics, and violence against women of colour. Stanford
Law Review, 43(6), 12411299.

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

Davies, Bronwyn (1997). The subject of poststructuralism: A reply to
Alison Jones. Gender and Education, 9(1), 271283.
de Lauretis, Teresa (1986). Feminist studies/critical studies: Issues,
terms and contexts. In Teresa de Lauretis (Ed.), Feminist studies/
Critical studies (pp. 119). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dei, George J. Safa (1996). Anti-racism education: Theory and
practice. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing.
Dua, Enakshi, & Lawrence, Bonita (2000). Challenging white
hegemony in university classrooms: Whose Canada is it? Atlantis, 24, 105121.
Dua, Enakshi, & Robertson, Angela (1999). Scratching the surface:
Canadian, anti-racist, feminist thought. Toronto: Women's Press.
Felman, Shoshana (1992). Education and crisis: Or on the vicissitudes of
teaching. In Shoshana Felman, & D. Laub (Eds.), Testimony: Crises
of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history (pp. 156).
New York: Routledge.
Fitzsimons, Patrick (2002). Neoliberalism and education: The
autonomous chooser. Radical Pedagogy http://radicalpedagogy.
icaap.org/content/issue4_2/04_fitzsimons.html
Foucault, M. (1982). The subject of Power. In H. Dreyfus, & P.
Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and
hermeneutics Brighton: Harvester.
Francis, Becky (2001). Commonality and difference? Attempts to
escape from theoretical dualisms in emancipatory research in
education. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 11(2),
157172.
Francis, Becky (2001). Beyond postmodernism: Feminist agency in
educational research. In Becky Francis & Carol Skelton (Eds.),
Investigating gender: Contemporary perspectives in education
(pp. 6576). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Francis, Becky, & Archer, Louise (2004). The problematization of
agency in postmodern social theory: As feminist educational
researchers, where do we go from here? (The London Feminist
Salon Collective). Gender and Education, 16(1), 2533.
Frankenburg, Ruth, & Mani, Lati (2001). Cross currents, crosstalk:
Race, post-coloniality and the politics of location. In K. K.
Bhavnani (Ed.), Feminism and Race (pp. 479491). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Frosh, Stephen, Burman, Erica, & Clements, Jane (2006). Rethinking
pedagogy: What does it mean to learn and know? One day
workshop, Institute of Education, November, 2006.
Frosh, Stephen, Phoenix, Ann, & Pattman, Rob (2000). But its racism
I really hate: Young masculinities, racism and psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 17(2), 225242.
Giddens, Anthony (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the
theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gill, Rosalind C. (2006). Critical respect: The difficulties of agency
and choice for feminism. European Journal of Women's Studies,
14(1), 6576.
Gillborn, David, & Mirza, Heidi (2000). Educational inequality:
Mapping race, class and gender. London: HMI.
Gordon, Linda (1991). On difference. Genders, 10, 91111.
Grewal, Inderpal, & Kaplan, Karen (2002). Transnational practices
and interdisciplinary feminist scholarship: Refiguring Women's
and Gender Studies. In Rolyn Wregman (Ed.), Women's Studies on
its own (pp. 6681). Owham: Duke University Press.
Hammersley, Martin, & Atkinson, Paul (1995). Ethnography:
Principles in practice. London: Routledge.
Henriques, Julian, Hollway, Wendy, Urwin, Cathy, Venn, Couze, &
Walkerdine, Valerie, (1984/2002). Featured Reprint: Selections
from Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and
Subjectivity, Feminism and Psychology, 12 (4) 427431.

277

Henry, Frances, Tator, Carol, Mattis, Winston, & Rees, Tim (1995).
The colour of democracy: Racism in Canadian society. Toronto:
Harcourt Brace.
Hey, Valerie (2006). The Im/possibilities of Polymorphous Sociality?
Living between representations, desire and performativity in girls'
social worlds, paper presented at, ESRC GIRLS AND EDUCATION: 316: Continuing Concerns, New Agendas: Seminar 3,
Lancaster University, Lancaster.
Hollway, Wendy, & Jefferson, Tony (2000). Doing qualitative
research differently: Free association, narrative and the interview
method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Jones, Allison (1997). Teaching post-structuralist feminist theory
in education: Student resistances. Gender and Education, 9(3),
261269.
Lucey, Helen (2001). Social class, gender and schooling. In Becky
Francis & Carol Skelton (Eds.), Investigating gender: Contemporary perspectives in education (pp. 177188). Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Ludvig, Alice (2006). Difference between women? Intersecting voices
in a female narrative. European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(3),
245286.
Luhmann, Susanne, Braithwaite, Ann, Heald, Susan, & Rosenberg,
Sharon (2004). Troubling Women's Studies: Pasts, presents and
possibilities. Toronto, ON: Sumach Press.
Luke, Carmen (1994). Women in the academy: The politics of speech
and silence. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15(2),
211229.
Mama, Amina (1995). Beyond the masks: Race, gender and
subjectivity. London: Routledge.
Maynard, Mary (1996). Challenging the boundaries: Towards an antiracist women's studies. In Mary Maynard & June Purvis (Eds.),
New frontiers in women's studies: Knowledge, identity and
nationalism (pp. 1129). London: Taylor & Francis Publishers.
McCall, Leslie (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), 17711800.
Mirza, Heidi Safia (1992). Young female and black. London:
Routledge.
Mirza, Heidi Safia (1997). Black British feminism: A reader. London:
Routledge.
Morley, Louise (1992). Women's studies, difference and internalized
oppression. Women's Studies International Forum, 15(4),
516525.
Ng, Roxanne (1995). Teaching against the grain: Contradictions and
possibilities. In R. Ng, P. Staton, & J. Scane (Eds.), Anti-racism,
feminism, and critical approaches to education (pp. 129152).
London: Bergin and Garvey.
Paechter, Carrie (2001). Using poststructuralist ideas in gender theory
and research. In Becky Francis, & Carol Skeleton (Eds.), Investigating gender: Contemporary perspectives in education (pp. 4151).
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Phoenix, Ann (2001). Racialization and gendering in the (re)production
of educational inequalities. In Becky Francis & Carol Skeleton
(Eds.), Investigating gender: Contemporary perspectives in
education (pp. 126138). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Phoenix, Ann (2004). Neoliberalism and masculinity: Racialization
and contradictions of schooling for 1114 year olds. Youth and
Society, 36(2), 227246.
Phoenix, Ann, & Pattynama, Pam (2006). Editorial. Intersectionality.
International Journal of Women's Studies, 13(3), 187192.
Pitt, Alice (1998). Qualifying resistance: Some comments on methodological dilemmas. Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(4),
535553.

278

J. Ringrose / Women's Studies International Forum 30 (2007) 264278

Pitt, Alice (2001). The dreamwork of autobiography: Felman, Freud,

and Lacan. In K. Weiler & L. Stone (Eds.), Feminist engagements:
Revisioning educational and cultural theory (pp. 89107). New
York: Routledge.
Prins, Baukje (2006). Narrative accounts of origins: A blind spot in the
intersectional approach? European Journal of Women's Studies,
13(3), 277290.
Rattansi, Ali (1999). Racism, postmodernism and reflexive multiculturalism. In S. May (Ed.), Critical multiculturalism: Rethinking
multicultural and antiracist education (pp. 77112). London:
Falmer Press.
Reay, Diane (2004). Mostly roughs and toughs: Social class, race and
representation in inner city schooling. Sociology, 35(4),
10051023.
Reay, Diane, David, Miriam E., & Ball, Stephen (2005). Degrees
of choice: Social class, race and gender in higher education.
Trentham Books.
Ringrose, Jessica (2002). Developing feminist pedagogical practices to
complicate whiteness and work with defensiveness. In C. LevineRasky (Ed.), Working through whiteness: International perspectives (pp. 289318). New York: SUNY Press.
Ringrose, Jessica (2003). Learning too late? A psychoanalytic
reflection on the affective, defensive and repressive dynamics of
learning about race in Women's Studies. Resources for Feminist
Research, 30(12), 3350.
Ringrose, Jessica (2004). The defended subjects of Women's Studies:
Learning past the failures of racism, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, York University, Canada.
Ringrose, Jessica and Epstein, Debbie (in press). Boys, girls and
schooling: Contemporary issues in gender equality and educational
achievement, In Diane Richardson & Victoria Robinson (Eds.)
Introducing Gender and Women's Studies (Third Edition). London:
Palgrave.
Roman, Leslie (1993). On the ground' with antiracist pedagogy and
Raymond Williams's unfinished project to articulate a socially

transformative critical realism. In Dennis Dworkin & Leslie G.

Roman (Eds.), Views beyond the border country: Raymond Williams
and cultural politics (pp. 158216). Routledge: New York.
Rose, Nikolas (1989). Governing the soul. London: Routledge.
Schick, Carol (2000). By virtue of being white: Resistance in antiracist pedagogy. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 3, 83102.
Seidman, Irving (1998). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide
for researchers in education and the social sciences. New York:
Teachers College Press.
Smith, Beverly (1983). Home girls: A Black Feminist anthology. New
York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press.
Smith, Dorothy (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist
sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). Can the Subaltern speak? In Cary
Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Verloo, Mieke (2006). Multiple inequalities, intersectionality and the
European Union. European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(3),
211228.
Walkerdine, Valerie (1991). Schoolgirl fictions. London: Verso.
Walkerdine, Valerie, Lucey, Helen, & Melody, June (2001). Growing
up girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class. Basingstoke: Palgrave Press.
Walkerdine, Valerie, & Ringrose, Jessica (2006). Femininity: Reclassifying upward mobility and the neo-liberal subject. In Becky
Francis & Carol Skelton (Eds.), The sage handbook of gender and
education (pp. 3146). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Weedon, Chris (1999). Feminism, theory and the politics of difference.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Youdell, Deborah (2006). Impossible bodies, impossible selves:
Exclusions and student subjectivities. London: Springer.
Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth (1996). The anatomy of prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics.
European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(3), 193209.