Resisting Passion: Pedagogy and Power1

A white male student responds to a rigorous critique of US history by a black male social theorist with a pantomimed response to what he and other students believe is the emotional subtext of the book. He stands, drops the book on the floor, kicks it across the room, stoops—ostensibly to retrieve it—and kicks it again as fellow students laugh and applaud with approval.

Gay and lesbian students respond to a memoir of disappointed lesbian love with smirks. They explain to the instructor that they are unable to identify with what they take as obsessive devotion—that passion of this sort is both “unhealthy” and unnecessary in an age when romantic partners can be replaced with ease.2

Students in a public policy class watch a PBS documentary that focuses on federal welfare reform legislation and its effects on poor women and children. In discussion immediately following the viewing, they criticize the irrational affect of the women interviewed in the film.3 Further discussion clarifies that they have forgotten—or failed to hear—all crucial pieces of information in the film that situate the women's speech and affect.

Among the issues addressed by feminist pedagogy are the ways in which the discourses of subordinated groups are incorporated into mainstream educational contexts. In this essay I take up one dimension of this issue: the experience of teaching undergraduate students using identity-group texts that adopt or express a passionate style of discourse. What I shall call passionate pedagogy is often viewed with suspicion and resisted, or disavowed, especially—but not only—by students whose social identities are dominant in terms of race, gender, or sexuality.4 I shall argue that the resistance toward and disavowal of passionate pedagogy by undergraduate students can be illuminated by examining political and psychological dimensions of the split between public and private political spheres that helps to structure the realms of politics, subjectivity, and discourse in our