Five years since the eruption of the digitally mediated #MeToo movement, we teach a generation of students who have come of age in its wake. Keenly attuned to institutional efforts towards diversity, equity, and inclusion and ongoing activism for social justice, our students want to understand if—and how—feminist futures might interpolate feminist histories. This panel highlights how Woolf’s life and legacy offer theoretical, methodological, and practical frameworks for navigating complexities that emerge in today’s classrooms. We engage a diverse group of contemporary feminist interlocutors, from Tarana Burke—originary grassroots activist of #MeToo’s pre-hashtag nomenclature—to Rebecca Traister, Soraya Chemaly, Leigh Gilmore, Rachel Volgelstein, Mary K. Holland, Heather Hewett, Parul Sehgal, and Saidiya Hartman. The three papers examine the strategic deployment of humor in teaching politically charged material; theorize the mobilization of archives in depictions of gender-based violence; and model collaborative course design to explore both past occlusions and present and future potentials of Woolf’s work.

In “‘Equally, if you stop to laugh’: Teaching the Humor of A Room of One’s Own,” Lauryl Tucker identifies humor as an awkward part of reparative intersectional feminist work. As scholars, we tend to “get” literary modernism’s jokes; meanwhile, our powers of critique ensure the jokes never “get” us. For students new to modernism, though, a narrative joke poses a risk. Laughing with modernism can make one look at once savvy and insensitive, and not laughing can seem naive (“Is she serious?”) or scornful (“She’s got to be kidding”). But in the age of #MeToo, students often discern a shift in what is, and isn’t, funny “anymore.” One might not laugh, for instance, at the problematic humor of A Room of One’s Own (1929), and the attendant silence—potential nexus of aggression, pleasure, recognition, and exclusion—is a good place for pedagogy to pause. Woolf’s humor is easiest to teach if we examine its rhetoric and read it symptomatically. Doing so, however, risks a sanctimonious presentism (“‘We’ would never make ‘her’ jokes now!”) in which white feminism’s blind spots, nevertheless, persist.

Aili Pettersson Peeker’s “Critical Fabulation as Pedagogical Strategy” explores how Woolf’s writing incorporates historical events to underscore the pervasive iterability of violence against women. Later feminist writers have leveraged this method as a pedagogical strategy for critiquing gender- and race-based trauma. Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) embeds the documented 1938 rape of a young girl, which its protagonist recurrently imagines after reading about it in the newspaper and which reverberates throughout the novel. In Between the Acts and her nonfictional antiwar essay Three Guineas (1938), Woolf engages what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: a method of creatively articulating suppressed voices in archival lacunae. Woolf’s interpolation of historical events aligns her with Toni Morrison, who drew inspiration for Beloved (1987) from a newspaper clipping and who, less famously, wrote Jazz (1992) after seeing, in James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of Dead (1978), a photograph of a young woman who refused to disclose her lover’s name even as she lay dying from his gunshot wound. Tracing a methodological intertextuality from Woolf to Morrison via Hartman’s critical fabulation, Pettersson Peeker argues that intersectional feminism teaches us to reimagine the interiorities, contexts, and material realities of systematically silenced lives.

“Intergenerational feminist pedagogy: Designing ‘Virginia Woolf in the Age of #MeToo’” profiles the faculty/graduate student co-creation of a new undergraduate seminar. Alice Staveley had an epiphany when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s revelations broke: Harvey Weinstein had an avatar in Woolf’s predatory Nick Greene, the man at the “stageroom door” in A Room of One’s Own who rapes Shakespeare’s Sister. But why had few of Staveley’s students read Woolf as a feminist theorist? Through a teaching innovation grant, Staveley and graduate student Anna Mukamal iterated a syllabus design that put first- and second-wave feminist thinkers in dialogue with theorists of women’s anger (Audre Lorde, Brenda Silver) and activists (Mikki Kendall, Alexandra Bell). This transhistorical reading equips students to understand how exclusions work systemically over time. Room performs how cultural amnesia works: the cyclical nature of forgetting (and remembering) that women’s experience embodies knowledge of the risks of being gendered female. A critique of its time and for our time, Room presents a structuring logic through which to assess both #MeToo’s affirmative cultural work and its damaging elisions. Students’ critical-creative projects on Woolf’s “relevance” thread throughout this antiphonal colloquy.

These 15-minute papers enact the affordances of intergenerational dialogue. In the spirit of collaborative pedagogy, we reserve 20 minutes for open conversation about teaching Woolf, and literature broadly, in the age of #MeToo.