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Reflection in feminist teaching: Problems, paradoxes, possibilities

Is reflection always a useful tool for an understanding of how we are entwined with power relations?1 Is reflection always productive, in a positive sense? Does it always counteract consensual thinking, feelings of insecurity, a fear of failure? Or can it also result in a strengthening of such processes? If so, how can we recognize, understand and handle the limits of reflection? These are not new questions in feminism but the observation that reflection has become framed as one of the core components of the performance of a ‘proper’ feminist study (see e.g. Liinason, 2007; Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002) has made me increasingly interested in enquiring into the problems, paradoxes and possibilities in using reflection as a critical tool in scholarly practices with a transformative aim. This piece aims to think through these issues, and more precisely, think around the role and function of reflection in feminism through the experiences of students and teachers in the ‘Practising Interdisciplinarity in European Gender Studies’ summer school. I believe that reflection is an important tool in studies with a critical aim, enabling us to push the limits of our understanding and as such potentially transformative in effect. As practices of critical thinking, both teaching/learning and research can involve reflection, but this article focuses mainly on the use of reflection in practices of teaching and learning.2 In feminist methodology, reflection involves a careful thinking about the coproduction of the self and the relations of power that the self is entangled with (Richardson, 2004), and can allow us to visualize the partiality, situatedness and historical locatedness of knowledge production. It may create new points of departure for a new set of thoughts and a new set of reflections. Through this, reflection might allow for a critical study of how power relations are produced and managed. Reflection, however, has also been the object of productive critique in feminist and cultural studies. Sara Ahmed has enquired if, and in that case how, it is possible to reflect over past experiences without being involved in authenticity discourses, where these experiences are understood and reinforced as representative (Ahmed, 1997). Cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg has pointed to the underlying assumption in reflection that reinscribes not only ‘the privileged place of experience, but the privileged place of the author’s experience’ (Grossberg, 1988, quoted in Probyn, 1993: 27). Donna Haraway (1992) has called attention to the limits of the term, understanding reflection as only mirroring, reproducing or replicating one’s thought and proposes diffraction as a more useful