Conceptualizing Critical Feminist Theory and Emancipatory Education

This theoretical paper analyzes the relationship between critical feminist theory and emancipatory education as it relates to transformative educational practices. The first section will discuss how the author understands critical feminist theory by looking to Chela Sandoval's theoretical framework of oppositional resistance. The author discusses Sandoval's framework as a way to help better understand the many forms of resistance found within the discipline of critical feminism. The latter portion of the paper will argue that critical feminist theory is a valid methodology for reconsidering how educators might understand and rework or reframe their current practices in aiming towards true emancipatory education. Critical feminist theory calls on us to reconsider our existing understandings of knowledge, power, and spaces of empowerment. The author argues that critical feminist theory, as a distinct methodology, offers diverse ways to think about disrupting the canon, question hegemonic understandings of oppression, while also looking at the many methods and forms of resistance within each text as a way to think differently about transforming our educational institutions: both at the K-12 and higher education levels.