| This study investigates the complex workings of sex/gender as it comes into play when a reader meets a text. I worked with a class of English 23 students in an Edmonton high school. I examined their written responses to five texts to gather information about: (1) the kinds of primary, unconscious knowledges about sex/gender that students possess; (2) whether/how these unconscious knowledges function to predispose students to accept, assimilate, or resist the notions about sex/gender in a text; and (3) the potential of psychoanalytic theories to further our understanding of the processes whereby a reader constructs a unique interpretation.;The study springs from my conviction that we must remain aware, as we approach fictional texts with our students, that adolescent readers are not simply "male" or "female" by any essentializing biological or socio-cultural definition. Each reader comes to a text with many defining specificities, of which I take the experience of sex/gender to be the most fundamental and the most problematic, particularly for adolescents.;Reader-response and feminist literary theories have both played influential and valuable roles, over at least the last fifty years, in radically altering the way English language arts instruction looks in our schools. Reader-response theories, along with post structuralist and postcolonial theories, have helped us to understand the reader-text exchange in fundamentally different terms than earlier perspectives offered, or allowed. Feminist theories have attempted to compensate for a long tradition of patriarchal bias in western cultures that has privileged male authors, male critics, and male experience. However, despite more than two centuries of discourse honoring Enlightenment/humanist ideals of equality and justice, expressions of misogyny and homophobia are all too evident in our classrooms.;Psychoanalytic theories help to explain why this is so by pointing to the existence of the unconscious and providing a vocabulary that we can use to talk about its role in shaping behavior, including the reader-text exchange. Students' responses have convinced me of the need to push beyond the interpretations of reader-response theories as they are expressed in and undergird existing curricula, teaching practices, and assessment strategies in English language arts classrooms in Alberta. |
