Kinesthetic and Feminist Methodologies: Creating Sanctuaries for Boldness and Vulnerability

What is to know something somatically through movement and other bodily sensations? How does this kind of knowledge relate to knowledge in other sensory modes? As a psychologist and aikido and yoga practitioner for more than 25 years, I have felt in my teaching endeavor how the body work processes lead to places and spaces of liberation, of possible emancipation even if it is momentary. I will share my experience teaching “Feminist Cultural Studies: Video and Performance” at the Department of English (McGill University) for which I was awarded with the Teaching of Excellence Award at McGill University (2024). I aimed to explore feminist strategies and research-creation methodologies as a tool for personal, social and political change. I approached questions on the meaning-making of video and performance as aesthetic and political practice processes within feminism. I used my skills in interviewing, listening, observation and empathy as modes of developing teaching strategies and creating a safe learning environment. I am aware of the different learning styles and I focused specially on embodied ways of building knowledge and the importance of lived experiences. The environment created during this course allowed the students to felt comfortable to work on personal and political issues. They defined this course as a sanctuary where it was possible to create an anti-hierarchical environment with space for boldness and vulnerability. I will explain how perceptual and embodied methods provided genuine tools to develop an interdisciplinary methodology based on kinesthesia, the sense of our body position, and kinesthetic empathy, the engagement with another’s movement or sensorial experience of movement. I propose feminist embodied methodologies in classrooms, and propose ways of “doing”, explaining different strategies as possibilities to generate knowledge in kinesthetic manners drawing mainly upon “embodied methodologies” (Spatz, 2017) and “kinesthetic empathy” (Sklar, 1994; Reynolds and Reason, 2012).