Teaching Through the Backlash: Bodies, Hearts, and Time in the Post‐#MeToo U.S. Literature Classroom

ABSTRACT In this essay, I survey the North American literature classroom post‐#MeToo, using my Spring 2024 undergraduate honors course, an introduction to Literary Sexuality Studies, for my case study. Picking up Susan Faludi's classic concept of the anti‐feminist backlash, I show that Gen Z students (and their instructors) are aware of #MeToo's promises, breakthroughs, and challenges—and of the fact that last decade's period of intense agitation is, for now, over. Once again, feminist pedagogy must be done from within the backlash, during a period of dimming hope and fearful retrenchment. I rehearse strategies for introducing students to #MeToo as a historically situated phenomenon and for cultivating a transnational feminist consciousness to weather the storms to come. I use three conceptual heuristics to do so. The first, “bodies,” allows me to track post‐#MeToo changes in how students approach gendered corporealities, both in cultural texts and their own experience. Second, “hearts,” attempts to paint a picture of students' consolidating political commitments, riven as they are by local and global dynamics. Finally, “time” seeks to theorize feminist pedagogy's fundamental challenge of addressing politically diverse students, many of whom haven't gotten around to subscribing to feminism. Overall, this piece wants to articulate feminist pedagogy's obligation to inhabit different temporalities and nationalities while remaining attentive to local and personal contexts.