Teaching and learning feminisms with Pacific Islanders: an emotional journey

Abstract

This paper is a feminist reflection of our experience teaching and learning feminisms with Pacific Islanders. We take as a starting point that feminism itself is encased in emotion. In the Pacific, some antagonise the term “feminism” as a foreign imposition and a “threat” to Pacific cultures. To others, feminism instils hope in the context of egalitarian aspirations framed within a development discourse. Some cautiously engage with feminist values, others embrace the notion passionately, generating multiple Pacific feminisms. Indirectly but instinctively, our approach to the teaching of feminism in this context has been to embark with students on a journey of experience and idea sharing and view it as an emotional journey. Acknowledging our positionalities, with their commonalities and differences, we examine the sentiments towards feminism embedded in postcolonial dynamics, as they manifest in our classrooms, and consider strategies for decolonial pedagogies of feminism.