Navigating Discomfort, Acceptance, and Solidarity as an Asian American Classical Musician and Scholar

By: Sylvie Tran

Abstract

In this essay, I think through my personal experiences as a Vietnamese American classical musician and music theorist. I describe two main sites of discomfort that I (and that many other Asian and Asian American classical musicians) experience: the first is the impossible double bind that suggests that Asian and Asian American musicians are perceived as highly successful in the classical music world, but that their playing is overly technical and emotionless. The second is the discomfort that I feel as a queer Asian American woman who depends on the music of white, European, male composers in my work as a music theorist and teacher. I argue that accepting and embracing these discomforts can lead to community-building and solidarity, especially in the classroom. To conclude, I describe a Theory I course that I taught in Fall 2022 that used the acceptance of this discomfort as a starting point for critical class discussions about higher music education and music theory curricula. These discussions, which encouraged students to reflect on their position within their institution and within their career paths, fostered classroom community and offered space for students to brainstorm possible solutions for the future.

When I received the Eileen Southern Travel Grant to attend the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Society for Music Theory (SMT) in 2016, I told one of my professors that I would be missing class that week to attend the conference. The grant—administered by AMS’s Committee on Cultural Diversity and named for the musicologist Eileen Southern, who was the first Black woman to become a tenured full professor at Harvard in the 1980s—provides travel funding to the AMS meeting for undergraduate and master’s students who identify as racial minorities in the field of musicology. After I explained this and said that the conference was taking place in Vancouver, BC, my professor said with a teasing smile, “You know you’re not really a minority there, right?”¹

Another time, a private music teacher I know began to ask me, apropos of nothing, “Where are you from?” I knew she was trying to ask me where I’m really from, so I narrowed my eyes conspicuously, and she changed tack mid-sentence: “Where are your ancestors from?”² I said, “Well, my parents were born in Vietnam.” In response, she said, “One of my students is very bright; he works so hard and practices a lot. He’s Chinese, you know, so there’s definitely a cultural thing there!”

At a summer music festival once, I overheard a faculty member talking to a colleague about his Asian students, comparing them to his white students.³ “They have incredible technical facility,” he said, “but they lack the innate cultural knowledge that they need in order to really understand European masterworks.”

I’ve heard variations on these micro-aggressions a lot. Some of them are couched in compliments and friendliness. Others are not so friendly. Asian people are so hard-working and disciplined. Asian people are so good at following the rules. Asian people aren’t really minorities anymore because they’re so successful. Asian people are so successful because they are good at imitation, but they are not good at creativity. Asian people are not good at creativity. Asian people are soulless robots.⁴

Where do the compliments end and the insults begin? What is the difference between them, really?

In this essay, I think through my personal experiences as a Vietnamese American classical musician and music theorist.⁵ I attempt to articulate some of my discomfort in the classical music sphere, and I also attempt to articulate why I’m still here regardless. I conclude with some thoughts on embracing my discomfort and using it to connect with my students and to build solidarity with others.

Discomfort

As an Asian American classical musician, most of the racism I have experienced has been insidious rather than explicit, often thinly veiled as a compliment. Flute is my main instrument, although I also took piano lessons through college and sing in a community choir now. Interestingly, most of the classical music–related racism that has been directed at me has occurred when I’m sitting at the piano bench, perhaps because the piano is a more stereotypically Asian instrument. I’ve seen the surprise in some people’s faces when they realize my piano technique isn’t very good. They’ll say, “Actually, you have a good sense of musicality and phrasing, but your technique is holding you back.” At the same time, people like my former professor will say to me, “You know, you’re not really a minority,” or “You know, Asian people are so successful in the classical music world that they can’t qualify for diversity initiatives.”

These anecdotes reveal two common genres of criticism that Asian and Asian American classical musicians face. The first genre is the “cookie cutter” criticism, which Grace Wang discusses at length in Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance.⁶ Wang reveals racial essentialisms that are at the heart of stereotypes about Asian classical musicians; one such essentialism is that Asian musicians possess impressive technical skill, but they give cookie-cutter performances that are bland and emotionless.⁷

The second genre of criticism I describe is often presented as a compliment: “Asian people are so successful, perhaps even too successful, in the classical music world.” While it is true that some of the world’s most famous classical musicians are Asian (such as Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, and Midori, to name three), this “compliment” is actually alarmingly similar to the “model minority” myth.⁸ This myth is harmful because it pits Asian people against Black people, Latinx people, and Indigenous people; the model minority myth has been weaponized, for instance, to argue for the end of affirmative action and race-conscious college admissions.⁹ While it is true that Asian people are often relatively prominent in the classical music world, promoting the model minority myth in this space is dangerous because it uses racial essentialisms to pit Asian musicians against other musicians of color.

These two criticisms are contradictory: the first one suggests that Asian musicians will never be able to achieve true musical mastery because their playing is soulless and (according to the music festival faculty I overheard) they will never truly understand European masterworks. The second criticism suggests that Asian musicians are too successful, that their musical skills exceed those of any other racial group (including white musicians). These dual criticisms put Asian musicians in an uncomfortable, impossible position. Which is it? Are we destined for mediocrity, or are we too successful to be considered a minority in the classical music world?

Now that I have mostly transitioned to research and teaching music theory (rather than music performance), another layer of discomfort comes from the complexity of my own identity (queer, woman, Asian American) in relation to the subject matter I teach (primarily masculine, white, European).¹⁰ Being one of the only people of color in my classroom almost every semester can often be part of the discomfort, to be sure. But more than that, what does it mean that my livelihood upholds and depends on the music of mostly dead, white, European composers? White musicians and music scholars might feel a sense of “white guilt” when they uphold these composers,¹¹ but my discomfort is more complicated than guilt. Why am I still here, studying and teaching and promoting the music of composers who would almost certainly have viewed me as inferior to them?

Acceptance

In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai explores a “bestiary” of minor, negative emotions that can arise from personal social and political experiences.¹² Ngai suggests that being attentive to these emotions in cultural texts and in our own lives can actually increase our agency in social situations where we feel frustrated or powerless.¹³ ¹⁴ In my own experience, embracing my uncomfortable, “ugly” feelings about being a queer Asian American music theorist has been productive: I have tried to use my discomfort as a site for growth. In practical terms, for me, this has most often come up in my work as a teacher, because that is the place where I most tangibly see how my actions affect other people’s—students’—lives.

What follows is a description of the freshman theory course I taught in Fall 2022, where I attempted to incorporate discomfort directly into my course curriculum. As a graduate student instructor who is required to follow a standardized Theory I curriculum across my institution, I have neither the power nor the appropriate training to teach a more expansive course that includes theories of non-Western musics.¹⁵ Furthermore, in my particular institutional context, it is important to provide some continuity for students who might go on to take another instructor’s class next year; I want to make sure students have the music-theoretical skills they need in order to thrive in another instructor’s class.

Where I did feel that I had some power and appropriate training, however, was in exposing the systemic biases that are present in the classical music—and especially the music theory—world, and in exploring discomfort in these spaces. In my fall class, we had some very frank conversations about diversity and inclusion in higher music education and in the music theory classroom, using critical readings from the field as guides. This was my way of accepting that my job and my position in it is uncomfortable, and I felt that it was important to explain and model this discomfort for students.

To provide an idea of how I folded these readings into the curriculum, I include below a lesson plan as well as a reflection on my class’s discussion about Cora S. Palfy and Eric Gilson’s article “The Hidden Curriculum in the Music Theory Classroom”;¹⁶ the format and goals of my lesson plan are inspired by the lesson plans shared in The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy.¹⁷

Goals

Understand main ideas from “The Hidden Curriculum in the Music Theory Classroom,” reflect on its applications in our classroom and in other classes students are enrolled in, and brainstorm solutions to some of the issues raised by the hidden curriculum.

Background

I assigned this article in Week 10 of our 15-week semester; students were already well-versed in the concept of the “Western music canon” and its construction, as well as common critiques about calls to expand it; they had discussed these ideas earlier in the semester through readings by Alejandro Madrid and Loren Kajikawa.¹⁸ ¹⁹ Furthermore, students had already read the article before coming to class and submitted a brief reading response (approximately one paragraph) describing at least one thing they found challenging or didn’t understand about the article, as well as at least one thing about the article that resonated with them or helped their understanding.

Lesson Plan (50-minute class session)

Explain my purpose for assigning this reading. Having already discussed issues of large-scale institutional and curricular reform in music schools through the articles by Madrid and Kajikawa, we are discussing this reading to begin considering what takes place at the classroom level.
Break into small groups (3–4 students each) to discuss a set of discussion questions that I wrote based on students’ reading responses. The discussion questions range from basic comprehension questions (“What is a hidden curriculum, according to Palfy and Gilson?”), to reflection questions based on shared experiences (“Does this class, or any other music classes you’re taking, have any hidden curricula that you can think of?”), to broader questions about improving things (“Discuss the possible solutions to the hidden curriculum that are presented in the article and identify pros and cons of each”). Throughout the breakout discussions, each group summarizes their answers on a collaborative Google Doc shared with the entire class.
Reconvene as an entire class to review answers to the discussion questions and share more ideas. Share how this article informed the way I designed the syllabus for this course; I was required to cover the standardized curriculum, but I also aimed to be critical about it in front of—and with—students.
Conclude by asking students to make connections between this article and the articles by Madrid and Kajikawa about large-scale curricular and institutional reform.

Post-Discussion Reflection

Because of the scheduling constraints of the semester, we only spent one class period discussing this article—we still did have to get through the technicalities of species counterpoint and figured bass, after all. However, I tried to carry themes from it throughout the rest of the term by pointing out examples of the hidden curriculum whenever I introduced new material to the class. I tried to provide background context on music-theoretical skills we learned, describing how they came to be part of the conventional Western music theory curriculum as well as the skills and musical contexts they might be best suited for. This provided students with a richer understanding of why each concept was on the syllabus.

For example, the week after discussing the reading, we began to learn how to write in the four-voice “chorale style” (or SATB style); I took the opportunity to explain how learning SATB style in a music theory class is both a relic of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German religious practice, as well as a convenient abstraction of harmonic techniques from the Common Practice period that cannot necessarily be applied directly to a non-chorale musical style.²⁰ I also played some examples of Lutheran hymns for the class, pointing out the characteristics of the SATB style that they possessed; I sensed that students appreciated having a clear musical genre that they could connect directly to the SATB style they were learning.

This transparency about our curriculum in class—making the hidden curriculum visible, or “embracing” it, as Jane R. Martin puts it²¹—also encouraged students to be openly critical and inquisitive about the curriculum. Their active reflection on the skills we learned in class was evident in the creative final projects they produced at the end of the term, which merged the Common Practice harmonic conventions we learned in the course with students’ own musical interests. One student, for example, composed a figured bassline and recorded it in the style of a rock song, while other students wrote harmonizations for songs like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and video game themes and then performed them with the class.

Assigning this article for discussion served to enrich the conversations we had already had about music curricula, and it also encouraged students to think about hidden curricula in our own classroom. By exposing and inviting reflection about the hidden curriculum in our course, I modeled my own discomfort about my complicity in teaching from a selective, historically exclusionary curriculum, and I encouraged students to confront their discomfort about their own roles as music students in a university setting. By inviting students to be in discomfort with one another and with me, I acknowledged that what we learned in class didn’t necessarily have a direct application to every student’s specific musical career path, but this acknowledgment encouraged students to find creative, personalized ways to use their newly acquired skills.

Solidarity

I want to return to the racially charged anecdotes with which I opened this essay. In addition to being outright offensive, these micro-aggressions are also predicated on false assumptions about me and about Asian and Asian American people. For one thing—at least in the world of Western classical music—these specific micro-aggressions are most often directed towards East Asian people. Since I am Southeast Asian, I used to react to these comments by distancing myself from East Asian people in my head: I’m not like them. I’m Vietnamese! I thought that maybe, if the aggressor understood that I didn’t belong to the specific demographic that they were stereotyping, then they would realize the stereotype didn’t apply to me. Deep down, of course, I’ve always known that it wouldn’t make a difference to them. I am Asian, I look Asian, and they see us all the same way.

If I am getting conflated with East Asian people, our struggles are inextricably linked. Distancing myself from them does nothing to help me get treated better, and it also throws East Asian people under the bus—I may as well say, “Don’t pick on me! Pick on them!” But recognizing that people are going to treat us the same way and understanding that our struggles are linked means that I may as well be in solidarity with them, because it means that we can be stronger by facing these struggles together. This type of multiethnic solidarity was actually a driver of the first Asian American social movement in the late 1960s, with the founding of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA); Daryl Joji Maeda describes how AAPA and the subsequent Asian American social movement highlighted the ways in which “Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans (the three dominant Asian ethnic groups in the United States at that time) suffered from similar economic exploitation, legal disenfranchisement, and social discrimination.”²² In addition to understanding and accepting the specific struggles I share with other Asian Americans, I also think solidarity can and should be a way of fostering connections and building community with others (not just Asian Americans); this community might consist of people who aren’t exactly the same, but who actively listen to, understand, and respect each other’s experiences.²³

By emphasizing self-reflection as a learning goal, I try to avoid othering minoritized students. I have observed that there are two primary ways in which minoritized students can be othered in a Western music theory classroom: in some cases, they might feel othered by the implicit whiteness of the curriculum because they don’t see themselves represented by the composers or musical styles on the syllabus. In other cases, in music theory courses that cover non-Western musics, the framing of these non-Western musics is often colonial and touted as “globalizing” and “exposing” students to unfamiliar musics, which makes the implicit assumption that most students in the classroom are white.²⁴ In contrast, I found that when my students in Fall 2022 were encouraged to reflect on their position within their institution and within their career paths, and when they were encouraged to think about the systemic issues in music curricula, they found community by sharing their experiences and learning collectively about institutional and curricular exclusion in music academia.

Most importantly, discussing these issues and modeling my discomfort transparently in class has, I think, challenged the normative classroom hierarchy that holds the instructor as the ultimate wielder of authority.²⁵ It has increased the amount of trust and respect that I have for my students and that they have for me, making my work as a teacher easier and more joyful in many respects. Finding joy in these small classroom moments gives me hope that I can continue to accept, learn from, and build community through my discomfort as an Asian American classical musician.

Bibliography

American Musicological Society. “Report on the Demographic Survey.” 2017. https://cdn.ymaws.com/ams-net.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/files/administration/DemographicsReport-2017-02.pdf.

Bardella, Kurt. “Op-Ed: The question every Asian American hates to be asked: ‘Where are you from?’” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2021. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-03-22/op-ed-the-question-every-asian-american-hates-where-are-you-from.

Bostow, Raquelle, Sherry Brewer, et al. “A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy: Critical View of Power and Authority.” Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Last modified March 2015. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/femped/habits-of-heart/power-authority/.

Burns, Chelsea, William O’Hara, Marcelle Pierson, Katherine Pukinskis, Peter Smucker, and William Van Geest. “Corralling the Chorale.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 35 (2021): 3–80.

Hisama, Ellie M. “Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn.” Popular Music 12, no. 2 (1993): 91–104.

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. New York: One World, 2020.

Kajikawa, Loren. “Leaders of the New School? Music Departments, Hip-Hop, and the Challenge of Significant Difference.” Twentieth-Century Music 18, no. 1 (2021): 45–64.

Luong, Vivian. “Feeling Like a Theorist.” Engaged Music Theory. June 13, 2022. https://engagedmusictheory.com/2022/06/13/feeling-like-a-theorist.

Madrid, Alejandro. “Diversity, Tokenism, Non-Canonical Musics, and the Crisis of the Humanities in U.S. Academia.” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 7, no. 2 (2017): 124–29.

Maeda, Daryl Joji. “The Asian American Movement.” In The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, edited by David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Palfy, Cora S., and Eric Gilson. “The Hidden Curriculum in the Music Theory Classroom.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 32 (2018): 79–110.

Project Spectrum. “2022 Symposium: In Discomfort.” Accessed February 16, 2023. https://www.projectspectrummusic.com/event-2022-symposium-in-discomfort.

Ross, Alex. “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music.” The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

USC Pacific Asia Museum and Asian Pacific American Student Assembly. “Debunking the Model Minority Myth.” Accessed November 15, 2022. https://pacificasiamuseum.usc.edu/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/debunking-the-model-minority-myth/.

VanHandel, Leigh, ed. The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.

VanHandel, Leigh. “The 21st-Century Theory Graduate Student.” Paper presented at Society for Music Theory, Virtual, November 2021.

Wang, Grace. Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015.

Wu, Ellen D. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Wu, Frank H., and Theodore Hsien Wang. “Beyond the Model Minority Myth: Why Asian Americans Support Affirmative Action.” Guild Practitioner 53, no. 35 (1996): 35–47.

Yoshihara, Mari. Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.

1
Depending on how you look at it, this statement might be true: according to the 2021 Canadian census, 43.13% of the population of the Vancouver metropolitan area was European and 45.08% was Asian (23.28% East Asian, 14.17% South Asian, and 7.63% Southeast Asian). But the point is more that Asian people are a marked minority in the American Musicological Society; a demographic survey of AMS membership that concluded in 2017 shows that 89.7% of respondents were white and 3.5% were Asian. “Report on the Demographic Survey,” American Musicological Society, 2017, 14, https://cdn.ymaws.com/ams-net.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/files/administration/DemographicsReport-2017-02.pdf.
2
The question “Where are you really from?”—which is usually a feeble attempt to determine the ethnicity of someone from a minoritized racial or ethnic group—is a troublesome question to Asian Americans; it’s a question we’re asked frequently, one that is rarely asked of white Americans, and one that implicitly suggests that Asian people in the USA can’t possibly be from the USA. This question thus reinforces the stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners in the United States. Kurt Bardella, “Op-Ed: The question every Asian American hates to be asked: ‘Where are you from?’” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-03-22/op-ed-the-question-every-asian-american-hates-where-are-you-from.
3
A note about terminology: in this essay, I often use “Asian” to mean “Asian and Asian American.” My reasons are twofold: first, for concision; second, because the anecdotes and ideas I share in this essay are most closely affected by the “Asian” parts of “Asian and Asian American.”
4
Cathy Park Hong painfully articulates the harm that these micro-aggressions cause: “American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance” and “feelings of dysphoria.” Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020), 56.
5
For brevity’s sake, I use the phrase “classical music” in this essay to refer specifically to Western, European-rooted classical music.
6
Grace Wang, Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 80-83.
7
Mari Yoshihara also describes this criticism, making compelling connections between this criticism and the Suzuki method, a pedagogical method was developed by the Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki. Suzuki’s method emphasizes listening and imitation as primary learning methods for young musicians. Mari Yoshihara, Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 43.
8
The model minority myth suggests that Asian people are perceived as more successful than other minoritized racial and ethnic groups, and that this success comes from the value that Asian cultures place on hard work and family. The model minority myth also drives wedges between Asian people and other people of color, especially Black people, because it falsely implies that Black people could overcome racism simply by working harder; it pits Asian people and Black people against each other. Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013). USC Pacific Asia Museum and Asian Pacific American Student Assembly, “Debunking the Model Minority Myth,” accessed November 15, 2022, https://pacificasiamuseum.usc.edu/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/debunking-the-model-minority-myth/.
9
Frank H. Wu and Theodore Hsien Wang, “Beyond the Model Minority Myth: Why Asian Americans Support Affirmative Action,” Guild Practitioner 53, no. 35 (1996): 35–47.
10
Ellie Hisama and Vivian Luong have also written on the intersection of gender and Asian American identity in music theory. Hisama explores examples of Orientalism and fetishization of Asian American women in Western music, touching on how unsettling it is to be both desired and rejected because of your race, and how broad stereotypes about Asian Americans at large leads to a loss of identity. Vivian Luong—invoking Cathy Park Hong’s notion of “minor feelings”—describes how the discomfort of being a queer Asian American music theorist leads to constant self-doubt and an exhausting desire for belonging in the music-academic space. Ellie M. Hisama, “Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn,” Popular Music 12, no. 2 (1993): 91–104. Vivian Luong, “Feeling Like a Theorist,” Engaged Music Theory, June 13, 2022, https://engagedmusictheory.com/2022/06/13/feeling-like-a-theorist.
11
For some examples and explanations of the “white guilt” phenomenon among music scholars, see Ross 2020.
12
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7.
13
Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 14.
14
In 2022, Project Spectrum also hosted a symposium that centered on discomfort, in conversation with Ugly Feelings as well as scholarship by Lauren Berlant, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney. Project Spectrum’s framing of discomfort focused on its consequences, such as “pain, violence, excess, [and] precarity,” and how we can sit with discomfort in order to handle violence that takes place in academia. Project Spectrum, “2022 Symposium: In Discomfort,” accessed February 16, 2023, https://www.projectspectrummusic.com/event-2022-symposium-in-discomfort.
15
Leigh VanHandel, “The 21^st-Century Theory Graduate Student” (paper presented at Society for Music Theory, Virtual, November 2021).
16
Cora S. Palfy and Eric Gilson, “The Hidden Curriculum in the Music Theory Classroom.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 32 (2018): 79–110.
17
Leigh VanHandel, ed., The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020).
18
Alejandro Madrid, “Diversity, Tokenism, Non-Canonical Musics, and the Crisis of the Humanities in U.S. Academia,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 7, no. 2 (2017): 124–29.
19
Loren Kajikawa, “Leaders of the New School? Music Departments, Hip-Hop, and the Challenge of Significant Difference,” Twentieth-Century Music 18, no. 1 (2021): 45–64.
20
Chelsea Burns et al., “Corralling the Chorale,” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 35 (2021): 3–80.
21
Palfy and Gilson, 104–105.
22
Daryl Joji Maeda, “The Asian American Movement,” in The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, ed. David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
23
I am very grateful to Surabhi Balachander and Jeremy Glover for their work on allyship and cross-racial solidarity, and for the many conversations we’ve had that have helped me articulate my experiences—as well as the notion of solidarity—in this essay.
24
I wish to add here that I don’t think that this “othering” is usually intentional or malicious—on the contrary, I have often noticed that instructors of these types of classes are well-meaning. Rather, the othering is a symptom of the systemic whiteness and exclusion present in the traditional core music theory curriculum in the United States.
25
Raquelle Bostow et al., “A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy: Critical View of Power and Authority,” Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, last modified March 2015, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/femped/habits-of-heart/power-authority/.