A Sentimental Education - Softcover

Hannah McGregor (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771125578 ISBN 13: 9781771125574

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2022

Synopsis

How can we reimagine feminist learning as a collective practice?

About this title

About the Author

Hannah McGregor is an Associate Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University. She is the host of the podcasts Secret Feminist Agenda and The SpokenWeb Podcast, and co-host of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast about the Harry Potter world. She also co-edited the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from A Sentimental Education,by Hannah McGregor, pp. 3-5 (WLU Press, 2022)

I was raised on sentimentality: girl heroines whosepluck and imagination and capacity for care elevated them above other girls—ina world where girlhood itself had no innate value—and instead made themremarkable, noteworthy. I was raised on Pride and Prejudice’sElizabeth Bennett and Anne of Green Gables’s Anne Shirleyand Little Women’s Jo March, on The Little Mermaid’sAriel and Beauty and the Beast’s Belle, all queer girls justa little out of step with the world around them, prone, as I was, tobookishness and flights of imagination and perhaps to an unbecoming surplus offeeling that somehow convinced them, despite the restraints of their worlds,not to settle, not to comply, to “want much more than this provincial life.”And they were rewarded, these plucky girls—who were all, it would take me yearsto realize, white—by beauty and marriage and some level of material comfort.

I recognized myself, a precociously smart whitegirl, in these heroines, and also knew that their story would not be my storyuntil I solved the central problem of me, which was my fatness. Being fat canbe radicalizing, if you let it, but sometimes it takes a while. I had ayouthful conviction that I, too, had the stuff of a sentimental heroine buriedbeneath the body I’d been taught to think of as “not me,” but a thing I must beliberated from. This conviction was amplified by the domestic tragedy I livedthrough for most of my youth. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I waseight and died by suicide at the age of forty-four, when I was sixteen. As muchas I was shaped by my mother, by the person she was, I was also shaped by thefact of her death and the stories I told myself to try to make sense of it.

I begin here, with my body and with my mother,because these are the objective facts about me. I’m beginning with the objective:what I have observed, recorded, experienced. This is how Manulani Aluli-Meyer,a scholar of Indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies, explains objectivity, assomething located in the body: “Body is a synonym for external, objective,literal, sensual, empirical” (2006, 266). The objective is what we can count: Ihad one mother, and then I had none. We were four, and then we were three. Whatcomes next, the subjective, the mind, is how we make sense of what we haveobserved; this is what I call theory, and what Aluli-Meyer calls “logic,rationality, intelligence, conceptualization” (272). We err when we mistakesubjectivity for objectivity, when we begin with the interpretation and pretendthat it isn’t an interpretation at all but a statement of fact, when we beginwith the theory and discard any experiences (especially those of marginalized peoples)that don’t fit. But theories are damned seductive, and they can make the rawstuff of experience hurt a whole lot less.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1771125578
• ISBN 13: 9781771125574
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 142