This paper maintains that teachers’ emotional investments and expectations have ethical consequences, and thus, should be, albeit imperfectly, identified and self-critically explored. I begin by problematizing the idea that teachers should be without desires of their own and then focus self-reflexively on my desire to be loved by my students by critically examining this desire through the following questions: What does my desire conceal? Whom does my desire exclude?

This paper examines some ethical and pedagogical implications -- and applications -- of re-integrating experience that is so often fragmented when literary experience is regarded as a form of the "real" experience of real readers reading within a pluralistic educational setting. It offers an approach to embodied reading which seeks to marry Northrop Frye's objective of reintegrating Eliot's dissociation of sensibility with some of the principles of feminist pedagogy, in which readers' situatedness in an increasingly variegated learning environment is taken seriously. The paper concludes with a discussion of exercises actually used in literature classrooms by real readers.

This essay explores the difficult question of whether, why, and how academics should think about teaching the texts they love. Working within a framework which incorporates both psychoanalytic and reader-response theories, the essay begins with a theoretical discussion of why this problem is important for literature education and expostulates the key terms which will be utilized throughout the text -- 'desire,' direct response,' & 'self-subversive self-reflection.' Then the authors each write from the perspective of her own experience about their felt responses to Jane Campion's film The Piano. These readings are then re-visited self-reflexively by each author in order to illuminate what unconscious desires these aesthetic engagements and emotional investments reveal and conceal. Interpreting these associations respectively as the ‘dream of love,’ the ‘will to power,’ and the ‘re-captivation of desire,’ the authors conclude by exploring what these dynamics might mean in the struggle for responsible pedagogy.

This paper relates my herstory as a feminist reader, recounting my search for an aesthetic of reading which incorporates both pleasure and ethical responsibility. I identify four ‘stages’ of myself as a feminist reader of fiction which are distinguished by my aesthetic responses: wariness, anger, and pain as an emerging feminist who read androcentric texts through a feminist filter; pre-critical enjoyment when reading only women-authored fiction during my second, gynocentric stage; the problematization of my reader pleasure, in particular my essentialist assumptions about texts and authors, in my third stage as a poststructuralist feminist reader; and, in my fourth and current ‘stage,’ my ‘re-captivation’ with male-authored and women-authored fiction -- a felt-situated response which negotiates aesthetic pleasure with the political concerns of my feminism. The paper concludes with a discussion of what this personal phenomenology might offer other feminists and women's studies educators.

This paper posits a feminist aesthetic of reading, ‘re-captivation,’ which accounts for both the reader's pleasure and his/her ethical responsibility. Re-captivation is distinguished by its introspective and ethical characteristics; it is a pleasure informed by the pain of misrecognition, i.e. acknowledgement of one's own complicity in systems of oppression. After a brief explanation of re-captivation, this paper describes my experience viewing the film Menace II Society. Using my paths of identification and emotional response to this film as my data, I analyze the complexities and ambiguities resulting from my practice of re-captivation.

This paper argues that feminist consciousness involves a "re-vision" of aesthetic definitions and norms which are revealed to be androcentric if not misogynist. However, the rejection of feminist aesthetics or its replacement with a feminist deaesthetic is neither satisfactory psychologically, i.e. personally, or politically. The abandonment of aesthetics ignores the importance of pleasure to individual response and the ways in which the aesthetic as a social category influences response. And while a deaesthetic is an important critical and deconstructive tool, it is incapable of instigating social change. This paper concludes with the suggesting that a possible feminist aesthetic might involve the re-definition and re-construction of traditional aesthetics, that is, their manipulation by feminism.

This paper argues that the feminist demand for individual resistance can be as tyrannical as patriarchal demands for homogeneity and concurrence. Because the personal effects the political, feminism demands that "good feminists" must resist many everyday practices. The feminist who conforms rather than resists may doubt she is a true feminist. Challenging this demand for resistance is considered to be anti-feminist. This paper argues that feminism must not become a totalizing position which dictates women's actions, but that it must exercise self-criticism and be engaged in what Teresa de Lauretis describes as a double project involving both deconstructive and constructive thinking.

This paper responds to John Rethorst's argument that the imagination is central to moral decision-making, even prior to deductive reasoning or abstract thinking. In his paper, "Art and Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Moral Education," Rethorst maintains that moral imagination is stimulated by aesthetic experience, or paraphrasing Iris Murdoch, "art is good for the soul." I am sympathetic to Rethorst's project yet argue that that the similarities shared by the moral and aesthetic imaginations do not provide sufficient proof that "teaching art is teaching morals." I further argue that Rethorst reclaims aesthetic experience by defining it broadly so that it includes everyday experience. I claim that in so broadening the definition of the aesthetic, Rethorst's presents a justification for aesthetic education where the 'arts' themselves are superfluous.

In this response I discuss Denise Egéa-Kuehne's "Neutrality in Education and Derrida's Call for ‘Double Duty,’" which argues that genuine learning is dialogical in nature and that so-called ‘neutral’ approaches to education stagnate the learning process when they exclude controversial material. While I agree with Egéa-Kuehne that such curricular heteroglossia can raise consciousness, I argue that her use of terms like 'intellectual competence' sets a criterion for literacy which perpetuates the dichotomy between reason and emotion, a hierarchy which diminishes differences in situatedness among students. I conclude by suggesting that this problematization of normative heteroglossia is consistent with the 'double duties' of educators outlined by Derrida

In this response I discuss Kal Alston's, "Race Consciousness and the Philosophy of Education," which encourages philosophers of education to interrogate the unintended consequences of philosophy's presumed racelessness. I agree with Alston that race conscious philosophy of education must challenge the meta-narratives and structures underlying philosophical discourse. I describe Alston's 'pragmatic infusion of suspicion' as a methodological shift which rejects the totalization of liberal ideals, literally a reality check in which the body and an individual's situatedness are used to measure abstract principles. I further characterize Alston's paper as an example of such praxis, philosophy grounded in everyday experience, history, and memory.