Ovid's Handbook on Rape: Feminist Analysis & Teaching Guide for Women's Colleges | Cultural Politics & Democratic Education | Classroom Resource & Gender Studies Curriculum

This book does something both unique and important: it really listens to women students, and it takes them seriously. In describing her own learning experiences as a professor of English at Mills College, Madeleine Kahn is honest and open about her own anxieties and her role in her classrooms. As a result, this book has much to teach professors and teachers of fields outside of English.Kahn's great contribution here is to recognize that young women students these days (and some not-so-young students) are reading literature and examining art with an eye to finding positive role models for themselves. Even when such an approach is patently inappropriate, as when students criticize an 18th-century actress for not being independent enough, it is so common a phenomenon that college teachers should take it into consideration when preparing to teach. I have encountered the very reactions, in my classes, that Kahn describes: women students become enraged at a female character in an ancient text for being "passive," or at the male author of a text that they consider hostile to women. They then become enraged at the teacher for giving them the objectionable text. In my experience, this sequence of events is universal in all-female classes (which can occur even at co-ed institutions). But I have learned that women students, even in co-ed classes, have strong and hostile reactions to literary depictions of sexual abuse and exploitation, and they don't hesitate to aim their hostility at their instructors (probably more at female teachers than at male teachers).Kahn shows, painstakingly, with sympathy and humor, how she learned to maneuver through these very personal, motivated readings, and how she learned from them. Her open-ness to learning from her students, and her readiness to be challenged by them, allowed lively, challenging, and exciting discussions. She also demonstrates that these students brought out new and useful insights into some very old works of literature, precisely because of their almost overwhelming tendency to identify personally with the female characters in these texts. Further, she shows how many of the questions and issues raised by her students are the very questions addressed by complex, sophisticated literary theory: how can a woman "read" male-centric texts? Is the author responsible for every reader's reaction?Highly recommended for anyone who teaches the kinds of literature that deals with issues of gender, violence, and other disturbing subjects.