Feels Like Teen Spirit: Teaching Cultural Difference through Bodies, Gender, and Affect

Abstract

Foreign-language pedagogy, cultural theories of affect, and feminism can join forces to help foster cross-cultural understanding among advanced language learners. This fusion is especially useful for commercial popular cultures whose surfaces evince few self-evident cultural distinctions. Theory's investment in affective difference and bodily movement broadens pedagogy's concern for optimizing affective learning factors in the classroom; affect resides in both the form of instruction and in its cultural content. Feminist epistemology operates as a vital moderator in this dialogue, for it alone can grapple with the functionalization of gender difference endemic to both native and foreign popular cultures. (RL)