Abstract / Excerpt
“I FEEL THAT TODAY BEAUTY IS STILL A CENTRAL IDEA." This comment from the conclusion of a student paper on Othello and Oroonoko suggests that classroom discussions of beauty may have a special significance, especially for college-age female students, who are particularly susceptible to what Naomi Wolf has named "the Beauty Myth."' As I try to teach students to talk about the intersectionality of race, gender, and other categories, I find an examination of the concept of beauty offers teachers a way to open up discussion of race in women's writings as well as in the writings of male authors such as Shakespeare.”
About the Author
Kim F. Hall
Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender
Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender
Shakespeare Quarterly
Oxford University Press
White privilege, Beauty, Pedagogy, Elizabethan beauty
Article
15 pages
Link for BC/CU ID Holders
Link for Non-BC/CU ID Holders
Citation
“This article is an invaluable pedagogical tool, and I recommend it to teachers -- especially those who don’t think they’re teaching race (the reasons become clear through reading the article) -- and students both. For students, Hall makes transparent the thought and the care that she invests in structuring discussions of race and gender and the ways she works to help her students, who are predominantly white, use critical, theoretical frameworks that center the work and not the individual students. Hall acknowledges the fear and discomfort of openly addressing race in the classroom – she models the work she wants her readers to do, walking us through a discussion of three Renaissance texts that ‘seems to crystallize for students some of the dynamics of race and gender that we work on throughout the semester.’ Hall relates how her students sometimes ‘had a hard time pinning down their disquiet’ when they disagreed with scholars they were reading; one of the most valuable aspects of Hall’s article is how she normalizes this difficulty and gives permission to both students and teachers to struggle with the inevitable ‘disquiet’ of grappling with race and gender as critical frameworks. What may be most original and valuable about this article, though, is the vicarious joy of watching Hall’s students analyze, discover, and argue. Hall shows what an explicit attention to race and gender makes possible for her students as intellectuals – how texts and images both become alive for them in new ways and become relevant in new ways. So the benefit for the teacher reading this article is twofold: in Hall’s modeling of how to use critical lenses of race, gender, and beauty in a way that accepts discomfort as inevitable, and in getting to witness, along with Hall, the deep reading her students are able to do when given these critical tools.”
- Wendy Schor-Haim, English & First Year Foundation