The article discusses the philosophical implications of a seminar discussion of the short experimental movie "Tough Enough" by Lukas Blakk. Aiming to sensitize future English teachers for questions of gender and sexuality, the seminar revolved around designing a teaching unit based on the movie which portrays the experiences and struggles of a young student whose transgender gaze disrupts the dichotomies of male and female in the social order of an American high school (Kleiner/ Decke-Cornill 2011). Despite weeks of preparation through readings in feminist and critical gender theory prior to watching the film, the seminar discussion following the first viewing was not able to relate the topics of psychic and social suffering portrayed in the movie to its socio-critical concerns. In the students’ interpretations of the movie an individual psychological, pathologizing outlook wholly gained precedence over the socio-critical perspective conceived by the filmmaker and supported further by the academic literature. In a way, this experience might be taken as rather ordinary. Teachers and educators will find more often than not that despite their best intentions and preparations, students remain resistant or at least slow in taking up new ideas and concepts that challenge their habitual forms of thinking and speaking about the world. However, insofar as the seminar had been designed with the specific intent to empower traditionally marginalized groups through the positive representation and recognition (Fraser/ Honneth 2003) of non-normative bodies and desires within the canon of the English language classroom, the specific resistance of the students is not benign but poses an extraordinary challenge. As Ellsworth pointed out already in 1989, the discourses of the pedagogy of empowerment “consistently position students as individuals with only the most abstract of relations to concrete contexts of struggle” (311), but that her own experience as a college teacher made her see that “acting as if our classroom were a safe space in which democratic dialogue was possible and happening did not make it so” (315). Furthermore, other experiences with anti-racist education have shown that the “emotional burnout” of racialized participants of anti-racist workshops often becomes interpreted as a “lack of caring” (Srivastava/ Francis 2006: 290). Instead of questioning why certain educational measures might revive and repeat the traumatization of the very participants whose situation it was designed to improve, the well-meaning and empathetic workshop organizers wondered why exactly these persons were not interested in this emancipatory endeavor as apparently evidenced by their high drop-out rate.

After sketching the problem exemplified by the seminar discussion, the article will then pursue the question of how, insofar as we consider ourselves committed to an education for social justice and social change, it is possible to contribute to this end without repeating the very injuries we set out to confront. A discussion of Stanley Cavell’s objections against John Rawls’ idea of the implications of the conversation on justice will prove helpful in this regard. According to Rawls, “those who express resentment must be prepared to show why certain institutions are unjust or how others have injured them.” (1971: 553) To this, Cavell responds cautiously, “Show this to, converse with, whom? It may be part of the resentment that there is no satisfactory hearing for the resentment.” (1990: 108) Trying to get a grasp of the example of the seminar discussion and thinking through what happened there, I will consider the philosophical consequences for a transformative pedagogy along the spectrum of representation, recognition, redistribution, epistemic injustice and the specific ‘drama’ of the conversation of justice.

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