Interview with Dr. Ileana Jiménez

Interview conducted by Shannon Bennitt
October 29, 2024

 

Shannon Bennitt: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what pushed you towards the feminist movement? Who was the first teacher who taught you about feminism?

 

Dr. Ileana Jiménez: This is such a great story. I love it as my origin story. When I was a senior in high school, I took an AP English class with Angela Welcome. She taught this AP English class that I loved, and throughout the year, she exposed us to a range of literature that I had never read before. But it got increasingly obvious that all of the authors that she was teaching us were white, male, Eurocentric authors. This was in 1992-93 on Long Island in New York.

 

The closing writing assignment for the year was a research paper, where she asked us to take one book from the class that we resonated with or found significant, and then to write a paper about it in any way that we wished. For me, reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was really important to me, because in the first chapter, we see this young boy being bullied on the playground. His name is Stephen Daedalus, and he’s growing up in Dublin, and I thought, I really resonate with this young kid being bullied on the playground because I had also been bullied on the playground in the early 80s when we moved from the Bronx to Long Island. 

 

I should explain here that both of my parents are from Puerto Rico. Everything that happened this past fall with Republican politicians calling Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” demonstrates that the racism of today was definitely the same racism as the early 80s. The same exact Reagan-era racism. 

 

I also had curly hair back then, as I do now, and it was much shorter and closer to my head. When we moved from the Bronx to Long Island, the kids—these white kids—would call me the n-word, they would call me “Afro.” They called me all kinds of names on the playground that stayed with me. So when I read this book by this white, Irish, male author from Dublin, I connected with it on a very real level. It’s a novel but it has autobiographical content. It's really about James Joyce, but he calls the character Stephen Daedalus. I thought, “This is me.” Throughout the novel, I saw myself. Stephen Daedalus likes to read poetry, he considers himself a writer and an intellectual, and he wants to go to university, and he wants to read and write and engage in big, philosophical questions, and he’s also sexually curious. And he’s also resisting the Catholic Church, he’s questioning the Church. I thought, “Wow, this is me,” but in 1993.

 

At the time, I was this first-generation Puerto Rican girl growing up on Long Island in the early 90s. I thought, “Where can I find books that reflect me back to me?” So I went to the local library, and I pulled out some of the card catalogs and I found this word as I was going through the card catalog, and the word was “feminism.” I had no idea what that word meant. But there was something about how it was spelled that gave me an instinct that it was what I was looking for.

 

So I went to that section of the library, I followed the Dewey decimal system and I went down into the stacks. I found all of these feminist books, I found feminist theory, and I found feminist literary criticism, particularly from the early 60s-70s. It was white, second-wave feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar who both wrote The Madwoman in the Attic, which is about 19th century literature, and I also found Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. I found all of these important 70s white literary criticism, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is it, this is it.” 

 

These women were writing a feminist critique of literature written by men. I also read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. All of this is happening during my senior year in high school, and at this point, I’m 18 years old. So I kind of found feminism on my own, but it was through a school assignment. It wasn’t like the teacher said, “Here’s feminism, and feminist theory, and we’re going to learn about feminist perspectives.” 

 

It was more that I reached this question: Where are the books that reflect me back to me? I didn’t say it like that when I was 18 in 1993, but I can reflect back on that younger version of me now.

 

The books that I ended up writing about were Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Judy Chicago’s memoir Through the Flower, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. It was two novels and one memoir, and I compared all of those books to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist. In each of the texts by women, all the main characters were women artists and they were all coming up against the patriarchy. 

 

They were all coming up against sexism, and they were all coming up against barriers, against silencing, against surveillance in different ways, whereas Stephen could engage in having sex with sex workers, and questioning the Church, and saying he wouldn't serve the Catholic Church, and all these things, and I thought, “Huh, this is what these feminist literary critics are pointing out,” which is that whether in books or in real life, men and boys don’t experience the oppression of the patriarchy because they created it, and are privileged and benefit by it. So, that’s how I, as a young Puerto Rican girl growing up on Long Island in the 80s and 90s stumbled upon feminism through the card catalogs and this AP English assignment.

 

Bennitt: That’s a really cool story. Thank you for sharing that, that’s a super cool story. I can’t imagine being in the 1990s… I mean obviously Ms. Williams and Ms. Kelly taught me about feminism, but I can’t imagine finding it all myself.

 

Jiménez: Yeah, it’s a lot to find on your own.

 

Bennitt: Yeah, I’ll look into reading some of those. I’ve read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, but I’ll look into the other ones you mentioned. For my second question, how have you managed being a public feminist while also being a high school teacher?

 

Jiménez: The public part started in a very interesting way. I’m 49, and in my mid-30s I had reached this plateau in my teaching career, so I applied for a Fulbright to go to Mexico. Just prior to that, I had started my Feminist Teacher blog. The reason why I started the blog was that I wanted to find community with other feminist teachers. At the time, blogging was the thing to do to find feminist community. The feminist blogosphere  was a space where I found a home. 

 

This was also the early days of Twitter, and people would find each other on there in these really exciting and connecting ways. My Feminist Teacher blog and my @feministteacher handle on Twitter together kind of catapulted me into this public feminist sphere. That’s how people started to find me, around 2009 and 2010, just before I went on this Fulbright to Mexico. Then when I went away to Mexico City, I was interviewing queer and trans high school students there, so I was tweeting about that. When I came home, I was also then tweeting about my feminist curriculum in New York. So all of these things started to snowball and catapult me into a more public sphere during that time.

 

When I returned from Mexico during the summer of 2011, I started collaborating with the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and their research on sexual harassment in schools, and that became a really important part of my work. Another feminist activist whose name is Holly Kearl and I started speaking at AAUW events through the United Nations in New York, as well as at the National Press Center in Washington D.C. The combination of doing more national and international work after my return from my Fulbright as well as social media allowed people to find me.

 

It was social media that allowed me to connect with other feminist teachers, activists, scholars across the country and around the world. I started to have feminist colleagues in the UK, India, Australia, and across Europe and Latin America, including Mexico and Argentina. 

 

So suddenly things started to explode around the world, and I was being connected to feminist activists on the ground as well as feminist scholars. I also started attending the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference, which is where I met your teachers. That event mainly brings together feminist professors, so we, the three of us, your two teachers and I, became the only teachers who would show up at NWSA. 

 

That’s why I went to their session, because I wanted to support their work and also create community, because you need community when you do feminist work, especially in schools, which I think connects to your other question, which is, because I came into feminism in high school, and then I wound up going to Boston University for my first semester of college, I wasn’t satisfied with being there, so I transferred to Smith College because I wanted to be in a feminist environment as part of my undergraduate experience. 

 

I knew that when I transferred to Smith in the middle of my first year in college that I wanted to focus on being an English major by studying feminist literature. I already knew that I wanted to be a high school teacher because of stumbling upon feminism during my senior year in high school. 

 

I thought, “That’s what I want to do, I want to replicate that experience for young people.” Coming into my own feminist consciousness as a senior in high school then launched my vision for what I wanted to do professionally. I basically navigated my college years with that vision of wanting to bring feminist theory and literature to the classroom, particularly the high school classroom because I knew how much it meant to me to come across feminism as a young person.

 

So that’s how I got into feminist movement work, was first through high school but then finding community in these other spaces, whether it was through NWSA or my international work visiting schools and presenting my pedagogies and research, meeting scholars and activists, and then the blog and social media. 

 

I think that because of the blog and Twitter, more and more people started to recognize me as @feministteacher and that allowed me to speak at other conferences and other schools and universities across the country and around the world, which then allowed me to meet more teachers and activists so that we could build, essentially, a feminism-in-schools movement, which I find really gratifying and meaningful.

 

Bennitt: Yeah, that’s really great. I was also wondering, obviously some people might see you introducing feminist literature and focusing on that as too political for schools. Have you experienced backlash?

 

Jiménez: Yeah, you know, the school that I worked in in New York City for almost 20 years, I created an elective there that was basically a feminist literature and theory class. I started that course in the fall of 2008, and that ran through the fall of 2023. During that expanse of time, 2008 to 2023, the course changed according to my own growth and development, meeting more people around the world, across the country, attending conferences, but it also changed because of student feedback. 

 

So students wanted, for example, to do more activism, so in the early years I included a connection to an organization that worked on the sexual exploitation of children and girls in New York City. We would collaborate with an organization called GEMS. GEMS stands for Girls Education and Mentoring Services, and basically what they do is support girls and young women who have been sexually exploited and trafficked. So that was early activism and advocacy that we would do in the feminism class that I created for high school students. 

 

Over time, I also started to collaborate with feminist teachers in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Mumbai; these colleagues wanted to address feminism in the context of sexual assault and sexual harassment in schools throughout India, so that was a connection around 2013-14. I also visited these colleagues throughout India, and I would talk to young people in schools about feminism as well as queer identities and activism.I would also take my students to the UN for International Day of the Girl as well as mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women with them every year. 

 

Then in the fall of 2016 when Clinton and Trump were running against each other,  I  offered this three-day class on rape culture. A friend of mine from London—also a feminist teacher, Hannah Retallack—came to New York to collaborate with me to offer this three-day class. During those three days, we discovered that the school I was teaching in did not have a sexual harassment policy, and this was a massive discovery. I did not know that we did not have a sexual harassment policy, and it was the thing that launched two years of activism against the school to basically demand a sexual harassment policy. 

 

Throughout that whole expanse of time from 2008 to 2016, no one had really ever pushed back on the feminist work I was doing at the school. And then suddenly, because we were critiquing the school for their lack of a sexual harassment policy, that was when I started getting surveilled. That was when I was getting resistance from the school. Not from parents; it was really from school administrators who were afraid that we had discovered that there was no policy at the school and that we were demanding  one.

 

This discovery resulted in two years of activism, and this was all prior to #MeToo exploding in 2017. This was 2016, a whole year before #MeToo exploded, and before the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018.  We  worked for two years with the school administration but despite that, we were also being surveilled. Administrators would suddenly pop up in my classroom trying to surveil what I was doing. I also had a feminism club where administrators would just randomly show up. It wasn’t the content of my classes that were being surveilled, it was specifically they didn’t want us to talk about sexual harassment, and specifically they didn’t want us to talk about sexual harrassment that was happening at school. We just kept pushing back against that regardless of the surveillance. 

 

Throughout that, I kept teaching my feminism class on feminist theory. That class would host an annual assembly. We would get up on stage, and that year in 2016, we actually called out the school when we disovered the missing sexual harassment policy. Trump was elected that same fall of 2016, and a week later, the students in the class—it was all girls in that class at the time, but it is a coed school—got up on stage and said, “Here we are, in the middle of this pussy-grabbing election, and Trump has won, and even in our own school, we don’t have a sexual harassment policy.” 

 

They put the school on blast, and the school responded by creating a new policy for assemblies, where they asked for the script ahead of time. It’s funny because even before that rule, I always had the students create a script for their annual feminism assembly. But now the school wanted to see the script ahead of time, and this is when we started to get more and more surveilled. 

 

At one point in 2019, just before the pandemic, school leaders actually took down materials that the feminism club put up on a bulletin board. The students in the club wanted to inform their peers about rape culture and sexual harassment at the school. But school leaders took down the students’ posters and infographics without even telling us. It was a lot. It was very demoralizing, and it was angering, and it was a lot of putting myself on the line in terms of defending my students’ right to speak out about sexual violence, both at school and beyond. The school basically supported activism on the street such as marches, but they didn't support activism at school, because once you do it at school, about the school, that’s when schools get upset. 

 

I want to also mention that a year later, #MeToo exploded in 2017-2018. I want to give credit to Tarana Burke as the original founder of the term “Me Too.” It had basically been taken up by this white, celebrity, social media storm that took place in 2017-2018. It was really Tarana Burke and her Black feminist coining of #MeToo that happened in the early 2000s, way before any of us were saying #MeToo, she said it first, and now she also has a national and global organization called Me Too International. 

 

Bennitt: That’s a crazy story, I can’t imagine what that would be like. For my next question, Ms. Williams told me that you’re a scholar of Toni Morrison, who I had never heard of before she mentioned it. If I’m interested in studying Toni Morrison, where do you recommend I start?

 

Jiménez: I would recommend starting with The Bluest Eye. The main character, Pecola, comes up against the most horrendous experiences with people who are racist and sexist against her as a young Black girl. We see example after example and it gets more horrifying as the novel progresses. It is one of the most banned books in the country because of a scene depicting sexual violence. But we have to talk about sexual violence in schools so that we don’t wind up with the horrifying politics we’re up against right now. 

 

Then there is Beloved, which I have been teaching since my mid-twenties. I’ve been teaching this novel for almost my entire 28 year career. I started teaching it to high school students probably when I was 25. I’ve always taught it to juniors or seniors or both. I started teaching it at a girls’ school originally, and then the coed school where I worked for 20 years. It is the most powerful novel I’ve ever taught. Every time I teach it, it’s like teaching it for the first time.  

 

Morrison is very interested in questions of race and gender together, particularly about Black women facing both racism and sexism. Beloved is about one Black women’s experience of enslavement and the violence that she endured, including sexual violence. It’s such an important book for now and forever and every high school student should read it. 

 

Bennitt: Yeah, that’s great. I will definitely read both of those, that sounds awesome. So, I was reading some of your Ms. Magazine articles, and in one of them you talked about the importance of reading bell hooks in schools. I was wondering if you could talk about how you were introduced to bell hooks, why she’s important to you, and how her work has shaped your journey?

 

Jiménez: She’s so important to me. I was an English major at Smith as a first-generation student; my parents had not gone to college and I was a die-hard English major. Sadly, I didn’t take any education classes. So when I graduated from college, I started teaching in girls’ schools, and I realized that I didn’t have a lot of background in education. I went to a local bookstore and I started poking around. I saw this yellow book and the title was Teaching to Transgress. It’s probably one of bell hooks’s most well-known books, particularly because it’s about Black feminist pedagogy. It was published in 1994, and I had graduated in 1997, so the book was pretty new when I found it. I devoured it and I thought, “Even though I’ve never taken an education class, this is all I need to guide me and direct me in becoming a feminist teacher.” 

 

I loved the words “teaching” and “transgress” together in the title. She essentially draws from Paulo Friere’s idea that we have to read the world and ourselves to develop critical consciousness. We have to be critical about systems of oppression—racism, sexism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, transphobia—we have to be critical about these interlocking systems and we also have to look within ourselves and engage in processes of what she calls self-actualization.

 

Feminist pedagogy, for her, and particularly Black feminist pedagogy, is about engaging in this dual act of critical consciousness and self-actualization. You must do that for yourself, but also open pathways for young people to engage in their journeys of critical consciousness and self-actualization as well. And what does that mean? It means really looking inside yourself—whiteness, privilege, power—as well as our engagement with capitalism as well as with imperialism. 

 

She was talking about this in the 90s. Black feminists have been doing this work all along. The Combahee River Collective wrote the “Black Feminist Statement” in 1977, which I think all high school students should read. That piece has the DNA of intersectionality in it, way before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it as intersectionality in 1989 and 1991. We’ve always had Black feminists who were talking about the matrix of power systems. bell hooks was writing about it in the early 80s. Audre Lorde was also writing about it in all her essays in her book, Sister Outsider, which has a lot of her speeches and lectures. 

 

Kimberlé Crenshaw knew who all these Black feminists were, she was just drawing from them to address what was missing in legal theory. She noticed that there were laws about gender, and there were laws about race—so addressing sexism and racism—but legal theory and the law were not addressing these two things together. That’s what she was trying to pinpoint, was this absence, and pinpoint how Black women experienced racism and sexism together, simultaneously. 

 

She named that absence in these two 1989 and 1991 pieces of theory, which became her theory of intersectionality. Which became, by the way, one of the cornerstones of critical race theory. Intersectionality is a part of this larger family of concepts of critical race theory. Crenshaw considers herself one of the early critical race theorists. 

 

A lot of critics of intersectionality have no idea of this history, they have no idea of these genealogies, particularly Black feminist genealogies, and instead villainize and weaponize critical race theory and intersectionality as “woke politics,” which they don’t even know what that means either. Being “awake” basically means being critical, being aware.

 

Bennitt: I also had a question about one of your other Ms. Magazine articles, in which you talked about how you’ve had male students who you’ve taught about feminism, and how they were able to take a lot away from it. I thought that that was super interesting, because Ms. Williams and Ms. Kelly had an AP US Government course with a focus on women in politics, and there were very few boys who signed up for it and took it. How did you approach that teaching of high school boys about feminism?

 

Jiménez: This is so interesting, because the whole time that I taught my feminism class at this coed school in New York City—I taught it between 2008 and 2023— there were only a few times when only girls took the class. So that means there was at least one boy in the class almost every year between 2008 and 2023. One particular year when it was all girls was that year when Clinton and Trump were running against each other. So that fall of 2016, it was an all-girl class, and I also taught the all-girl rape culture class that same fall. The second time that it was an all-girl class was during the fall of 2022 after Roe v. Wade was taken down. It’s interesting that in the same year when a woman was running for president against pussy-grabbing Trump, and in the same year that when Roe v. Wade was overturned, those were the only two times when I had an all-girl class at a coed school.

 

I have a couple of theories around this. The course that I taught on feminism was an elective, so it was not required, you could sign up for it as a junior or senior, and most of the students who took the class had already had me as an English teacher in tenth grade. That tenth grade class used to end with our reading The Bluest Eye.  Because I had taught these students all year as tenth graders, and we ended with The Bluest Eye, we were talking about race, gender, and sexuality. We were talking about all of it all year, but in particular withThe Bluest Eye, we were able to examine horrific injustices through the perspective of a young Black girl. 

 

The girls in my classes were like, “I want to continue talking about these themes.” So they would sign up for the feminism class. These were white girls, girls of color, Black and Latinx and Asian girls. There were also nonbinary students and trans students who took the class. And then cis boys, particularly cis boys of color, who were Black, Latinx, and Asian would take it as well. Every single year, except for those two times. 

 

I had a handful of white boys who took the course and usually the white boys tended to also have multiple identities, like sometimes they were queer white boys but straight white boys took the course as well. I’ve also had nonbinary white students as well. I’ve had trans students who have been Afro-Latinx trans, white trans femmes, Asian trans boys, white trans boys. So I’ve had a whole range of gender identities. But the one identity who took the course the least were white cisgender boys. I would say about 5-8 white boys took the class across that time. 

 

I think that boys of color knew that there was something about the class that would allow them to engage in conversations about race and masculinity in ways that they had not done before. Because many of them had read The Bluest Eye with me and we were talking about Black masculinity in that novel as well, a lot of the boys were like, “Oh, I’ve never talked about this in school.” So they would then take my feminism class, I think with curiosity, like, “Maybe I can talk about being a boy of color through a feminist lens.” 

 

I would also use words like intersectionality in my tenth grade classes as well. So I think that they kind of knew that they would be able to do something in that feminism class that was related to them, such as looking at their identities. This is what I mean by self-actualization, which was, in all the classes that I taught, whether it was 10th, 11th, or 12th, I would have assignments in the class where the students would engage in self-writing, memoir writing, personal writing, self-actualization work that would challenge students to look at race, class, gender, sexuality, in relation to themselves. 

 

Beyond cis white girls, and Black and Latinx and Asian girls, and nonbinary students, and trans femmes of any racial identity, I think the boys who were most curious to do that kind of work tended to be boys of color. I think they were like, “There’s something about that class that has something to do with me that I can probably relate to, and that I probably need to work on.” And they did. White boys tended to shy away from the class because I think they knew that they would be asked to do inner work that they probably felt they weren’t ready for. But then the white boys who did take the class, who were like, “What’s this going to be about?” really jumped in and did the work and listened and were, for the most part, respectful and I think they left transformed.

 

Bennitt: That seems like a really cool class to take.

 

Jiménez: I wish I could teach it again, it was such a special almost twenty years of teaching that particular class, and it was and still is very important work. And your teachers are doing that work through teaching history.

 

Bennitt: Yeah. To conclude, do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course, and if you do, why?

 

Jiménez: Absolutely. The course that changed my life was an AP Literature class, and I took it at a public school on Long Island. If I had not taken that class, I would not be talking to you right now. I really do believe that class changed the trajectory of my entire life. 

 

I would not have discovered feminism on my own, I would not have written that paper, I would not have read all those feminist foundational texts. I wouldn’t have gone to Smith, I wouldn’t have gone to a women’s college. I wouldn’t have started teaching in girls’ schools, I wouldn’t have created an entire feminism course at a coed high school. I think that my life would have been incredibly different. 

 

So it really launched the rest of my life, and I think that if an AP Women’s History class could do the same for a whole generation, multiple generations of young people, I think we would live in a very different world. Very different country, very different states that we’re all  in. And because your teachers are campaigning for an AP Women’s History class for the country, that’s really important work to do. 

 

Obviously we want this work to be done beyond AP classes, but it’s an excellent model to say, “Hey, we’ve got an AP Women’s History class on an institutional level of approval.” And, of course, as you know, AP Black Studies has been gutted in places like Florida, although ethnic studies is required in California, so that’s an entry way for feminist curricula as well. 

 

I think there’s different entry ways to do feminist curricula, it doesn’t have to only be AP Women’s History or the kind of classes I taught. You don’t have to have a special class or a separate class, it should be across the entire curriculum. At the same time, I think it’s also important to have specialized courses where you can really do a deep dive and potentially make an impact on young people in relation to critical consciousness and awareness that maybe would not have happened prior.

 

Bennitt: Thank you so much, that’s a great answer. I’m really excited about this project.

 

Jiménez: It’s huge, it’s so important. Such important work.

 

Bennitt: It’s been really exciting to talk to all these experts and activists. It’s fascinating how much I don’t know about feminism, even though I’ve done a lot of research.

 

Jiménez: You know, AP is an interesting industry as well. You have to pay for the exam, and some students pay to be prepped for the exam. There’s money, there’s capitalism, around AP courses as well. We can’t close our eyes, and be like, “Oh, this is the perfect magic wand.” 

 

At the same time, how can we create a critique of capitalism from within a course like an AP Women’s History class? Taking up what bell hooks says, taking up what Audre Lorde says, taking up what the Combahee River Collective says. They all say we have to do a critique of capitalism. So I think you can still do that kind of critical work within the umbrella of AP Women’s History. That’s part of fighting the good fight.