Power relations and pedagogy in Darder's critique of culture

Darder's critique of traditional pedagogical practices centers on the claim that there exist "power relations in classrooms that ultimately result in the subordination of bicultural students" (25). By the end of the paragraph in which she makes this claim, "bicultural students" have suddenly been redefined as "students of color" (25). When she returns to the subject of "pedagogical issues related to dominant and subordinate cultures in terms of the relations of power" it is to define the "dominant culture" in terms of the "ideologies, social practices, and structures that affirm the central values, interests, and concerns of those who are in control of the material and symbolic wealth in society" while the "subordinate culture refers to groups who exist in social and material subordination to the dominant culture" (30). By this definition, of course, women would qualify as a "subordinate culture," since making 70 cents to every dollar that men make for the same work is pretty much the definition of "social and material subordination" -- although Darder's outright equation of "bicultural students" with "students of color" (rather than "female students") in the opening paragraph makes it clear that she is less concerned with gender than with race or ethnicity; her concern for "bicultural students" is not predominantly imagining women operating in a male-dominated world as the definition of "bicultural." Darder eventually claims that "ideology can serve as a pedagogical tool of investigation rather than an instrument of domination" (32). In reacting to Darder's critique, it might be useful to inquire into her own ideology as expressed here is not potentially just as exclusionary as the ideology of the dominant culture: in an America where a man of color has been elected President twice but no woman has, it may be the case that Darder's emphasis on race or ethnicity as the basis on which "subordination" occurs is just another way of telling women that their concerns have to wait until more pressing and important concerns have first been addressed (which is, of course, a familiar method by which the subordination of women is accomplished by male hegemony). If nothing else, the "traditional pedagogical practices" that Darder wishes to critique have affected women as a class just as clearly as they have affected subaltern racial and ethnic groups, so it is unclear what the value of Darder's special emphasis on race and ethnicity is actually accomplishing here, apart from subordinating gender as a lesser concern.

3. Darder's definition of culture ends up being so far-reaching as to be almost meaningless. She begins with a fairly traditional view that culture includes "knowledge, belief, art morals, laws, customs, and any other capacities and habits acquired by humans as members of society" (26). Although it is tempting to pause here to question the broad scope of Darder's definition to wonder whether all "capacities" (like the capacity for rational thought) or "habits" (like chewing gum or biting fingernails) really qualify as "culture," Darder will go on to expand the definition even further just eight pages later. There, Darder advances the claim that "culture and ideology ... are linked through the production of all forms of consciousness, which include ideas, feelings, desires, moral preferences, and subjectivities" (34). This definition of culture grants culture a temporal priority over "all forms of consciousness" thereby suggesting that "all forms of consciousness" are therefore a cultural artifact expressive of the dominant ideology. How does this match up with a popular view of culture? While it is hard for anyone to say what is entailed in the "popular" view of what constitutes culture without constructing a straw-man argument based on no particular evidence, it is rather hard to imagine most of humanity agreeing with Darder on this point that "all forms of consciousness" qualify as cultural products. After all, the vast majority of people presumably do not believe their "ideas, feelings, desires, moral preferences, and subjectivities" are always and ineluctably an artificially-constructed expression of ideology designed to oppress subaltern groups, and thus Darder's definition of culture would seem manifestly ludicrous. As Darder's definition of culture would necessarily include Darder's own writings as a cultural product, the definition is also implicitly self-contradictory, as we must then question whether the opposition to hegemonic power expressed by Darder in the essay is nothing more than a cunning manifestation of that hegemonic power itself. And indeed, if hegemonic power is conceived of as all-pervading even in human "ideas, feelings, desires, moral preferences, and subjectivities" then what Darder's opposition to hegemonic power implicitly requires of any reader who agrees with Darder's stated political goals is to endorse nonstop thought-policing, which would render Darder's supposedly "liberatory" pedagogical approach indistinguishable from totalitarianism.