There’s a very specific kind of high you experience when you’ve managed to lead a fabulous lecture. I’d been anticipating it this semester, but I had to wait for at least four lectures until I was graced with it. Last year was strangely easier, even though my first lecture happened two months postpartum, at the height of my sleep deprivation. It has a lot to do with the students who make up the class. I teach what is known as a seminar class called Gender Equity: Equality in Working Life Situations to Bachelor’s and Master’s students of art and design at the Free University of Bolzano. It encompasses a total teaching time of 18 hours, which is not little, but isn’t a lot, either. Mid-way through the semester last year I had that alarming feeling in the pit of my belly when I learned that my primarily white students had never heard of Virginia Woolf. I thought you really had to be living under a rock to be white, female, and ignorant like that. Still, last year’s class had some forms of previous engagement with feminism and it showed in our conversations. This year I was better prepared to contend with the whiteness of my classroom, mostly composed of cisgender women, and asked them from the very beginning about their familiarity with feminism. When we did our round of introductions I’d asked them to name their privileges and their oppressor(s). They participated enthusiastically and I felt like I had earned their trust.

Over the next few sessions I decided to focus on building their foundation in feminist ideology, so we focussed on reading Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed and I encouraged group discussions in order to get them to open up to each other, teaching them about concepts like wilful ignorance and feminist killjoy and what encompasses the master’s house. I was preparing the groundwork for approaching a more difficult topic that was vital to discussing workplace equality and conflict: consent.