“I Am Afraid of You”

This article presents my experience teaching Euripides’ Medea in an upper-level course to students typically in the final year of their bachelor’s degree. I apply “social psychology,” proposed by Ackah and Boateng, to trace and understand students’ emotional responses to Medea’s act of violence. I present the teaching experience as a continuous narrative of a single class, using specific stories and conversations from several of the classes I taught from Fall of 2005 to Fall of 2007. These classes are usually filled with twenty-five to thirty students, approximately 30% of whom are male. In this article, I wish not only to explore the ideological complexities students reveal in and about themselves but also to reflect on myself as a woman and teacher. This article presents personal ponderings, my students’ and mine, of the complicated issue of living in a very masculine-dominated world. Nevertheless, it quickly became very clear that those young students studying in an Arabic Islamic university, despite dealing with fear and social constraints, were capable of high levels of exploration and critical thinking. Still, the study’s findings are tempered by the difficulties of the experience, particularly when viewed collectively, as the conclusion admits that this article barely opens the conversation and acknowledges the obscurity of a definitive conclusion. One major aim of this study, however, is to show how literature, despite religious and cultural constraints, can liberate students and foster critical thinking without necessarily sidelining their religious and cultural beliefs.