Gendered and Racialized Identities and Alliances in the Classroom: Formations in/of Resistive Space

Challenging the Cartesian dualisms that essentiality difference, this essay offers strategies for building transracial, feminist alliances through pedagogy. The authors argue that resistive classroom spaces should be created in which students and teachers challenge the discourses of domination that structure our understandings of identity and difference. To this end, the authors offer autoethnographic descriptions of their identities and their relationship as scholars-teachers-friends and support these descriptions with a case analysis of how they addressed issues of "race" and gender in an Intercultural Communication classroom. They conclude that building alliances requires theorizing identity as relational, requiring embodied practice and willingness to make "self" vulnerable to an "other," particularly when the "self" is inscribed with privilege and power.