Examples

I was thinking about feminism in the shower this morning. Specifically, I was thinking about the recent videotaped chat between bel hooks and Gloria Steinem, and how it provided a great example of friendship between feminists. But because feminism’s main strength, in my eyes, is the way it encourages us to question things we’d taken for granted, I began to question the most taken-for-granted concept in my own thought, the idea of an example.

checkerboard with checkers

"international draughts" from wikipedia

The MOOC I’m taking  (An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching) has reminded me both of the importance of examples and their drawbacks — that students often find it hard to pick out the important factors in an example. Is the real issue that the man had chest trauma, or that he was 68 years old and a smoker? Is the salient factor in the problem the inclined plane, or the fact that the block has come to rest at the foot of it?

So when I watch bel hooks and Gloria Steinem, am I seeing an example of friendship between feminists, or of women of a certain age? When I try to apply the analysis of examples I gain from science teaching to friendship between real people, its flaws become immediately evident. It depends on taking people as representatives of groups, rather than the unique individuals with whom we become friends.

Yet we are always making examples out of individuals, aren’t we? “That’s how men are,” we say, and Joe or Bob has turned into an example. “My student tried to solve it using this equation;” and student Sally or Jesse is now an example of a particular kind of success or error. The very concept of explanation seems to reward us for flattening the world into examples. I feel my students have explained patient X when they have shown me how his signs and symptoms are examples of hemolytic anemia, the larger concept that I’m trying to teach them.

It’s a constant temptation for those of us involved with specific concepts to treat human beings as mere examples of those concepts. But it must, I think, be constantly resisted. That way lies the doctor who is treating “the pancreas in room 5.” Or worse, the person in authority who decides that Elizabeth or Jose or Latisha must be “made an example of.” Flattening is a lovely verb for it, I think. A three-dimensional person must be flattened to turn them into a two-dimensional example. A person is right to resist and resent the process.

People asked bel hooks and Gloria Steinem a lot of questions after their conversation. And looking back, in many of them I see the tension between treating people as individuals or as examples. There was the young woman who wanted to know about calling-out, and the young man whose attempts to give up chivalry were upsetting his girlfriend. There were a few people distressed by feminism’s image as man-hating. There was a fellow who knew he didn’t have a right to ‘mansplain’ in feminist circles, but wasn’t certain what he then had to contribute. All these people felt the examples drawn from feminism were useful, but seemed to have found something wrong in the flattening process. (Or am I just making them examples of what interests me at the moment? Of course I am.)

How can you have a political movement made up of three-dimensional people? Aren’t they just too hard to move around the board? Or maybe three-dimensional people can make some different moves. Maybe they can reach right across battle lines and clasp hands, up there in the space above all our examples.

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