Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

This chapter is mainly a critique of Diana Fuss’s 1989 book Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. hooks says that she enjoyed the first half of Fuss’s book, but she became frustrated with the book when it began to make “sweeping statements about African American literary criticism,” which Fuss said is limited by its reliance on “essentialist critical positions” (78). hooks resents that Fuss used a few black feminist critics to stereotype all black feminist criticism, wondering if Fuss is “either unfamiliar with the growing body of work by black feminist critics—particularly literary criticism—or that she excludes that work because she considers it unimportant” (80). She feels Fuss’s work suffers by failing to do adequate research to support her claims.

hooks summarizes Fuss’s argument by saying that too often marginalized groups in the classroom rely on “identity politics” and tout their “authority of experience,” claiming they have gained knowledge through their lived experience, an experience not available to the other white students. hooks acknowledges that essentialism can be problematic in the classroom when it comes down to the idea that “only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering” (82), but she disagrees with Fuss.