Reading Against the Grain: Feminist Pedagogy, Critical Reading and the Literary Canon in English Teaching

English literature teaching has long treated the gendered politics of texts, canons, and classrooms as secondary to comprehension and aesthetic judgment. Feminist literary theory, research on gendered reading, and feminist pedagogy examine these politics, but they have developed separately. Drawing on reader-response theory, intersectionality, queer theory’s account of gender as performance and the concept of the resisting reader, it argues that a feminist reading pedagogy operates at three interdependent levels (interpretive, curricular and classroom) and that change at one level without the others remains shallow. With reference to Pakistan, it contends that settings where English is an additional language expose assumptions about language, authority and voice that Anglophone feminist pedagogy has left unexamined. The article offers a framework for critical literacy in English teaching and proposes classroom approaches, including in-role work, reader response journals, and structured dialogues, as directions for empirical research beyond Anglophone contexts.