Feminist Pedagogy and the Politics of Transformation in Mona Lisa Smile

Feminist Pedagogy and the Politics of Transformation in Mona Lisa Smile

Pratyay Malakar

School of Education Studies, B. R. Ambedkar University, New Delhi

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.903SEDU0502

Received: 20 August 2025; Accepted: 27 August 2025; Published: 24 September 2025

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the Mona Lisa Smile (2003) through the lens of feminist pedagogy, foregrounding the tensions between institutional conformity and liberatory teaching practices. The film portrays Wellesley College as a space that outwardly enables women’s education but inwardly upholds patriarchal ideals, reducing learning to prepare students for marriage. Centering on Katherine Watson, a progressive art history instructor, the paper explores how her teaching disrupts traditions by fostering dialogue, critical inquiry, and care. Drawing on bell hooks’ notion of education as the “practice of freedom,” Paulo Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy, Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care and listening, and Sharmila Rege’s Phule-Ambedkarite Feminist perspectives, the analysis interrogates both the possibilities and limits of feminist classrooms. The essay highlights moments where Watson nurtures student agency and voice, but also instances where her pedagogy risks becoming prescriptive rather than dialogic. Resistance from students, institutional surveillance, and entrenched gendered expectations further reveal the emotional labour and contradictions of feminist praxis. By interrogating Watson’s own positionality and considering students’ counter-narratives and micro-resistances, the paper expands the critique beyond liberal feminism toward intersectional and decolonial pedagogical possibilities. Ultimately, the paper argues that feminist pedagogy is not a fixed method but an ongoing stance, that demands care, accountability, and the capacity to listen across difference, even within resistant and hierarchical contexts.

Keywords: Feminist Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy, Positionality, Classrooms, Care Ethics, Practice of Freedom

INTRODUCTION AND THE CONTEXT OF THE FILM

Released in 2003 and directed by Mike Newell, Mona Lisa smile is a period drama set in the fall of 1953 at Wellesley College, an elite women’s liberal art institution based in Massachusetts, USA. The film follows Katherine Watson, a progressive and idealistic Art History instructor from California, who joins with the hope of inspiring her students to think beyond the rigid conventions of domesticity and social conformity. Yet what she encounters is not a liberal haven for women’s empowerment, but what she calls later ‘a finishing school disguised as a college’ (Newell, 2003, 01:12:47).

The film positions itself in the post-World War III era, when the dominant social contract rewarded women for conformity, marriage and reproduction (Rubio-Marin, 2015). Despite being enrolled in a prestigious college, students at Wellesley view education as a temporary pursuit before marriage. The symbolic scene at the beginning of the academic year, where Joan knocks at the “door of learning” and declares herself on behalf of every woman seeking to “awaken their spirit through hard work and dedicate her life to knowledge” (Newell, 2003, 00:03:57), sets up an expectation of transformation for all of its women students. However, that promise remains hollow for most of the students as the institution ultimately grooms them to be “future wives” rather than “thinkers and leaders”. This contradictions between promise and practices builds the tensions in the film and forms the basis for a feminist pedagogical enquiry. I thought of choosing this as a film for analyzing and understanding the making of a feminist learning environment because this film breaks down the dominant understanding that not all women-only educational spaces are inherently feminist spaces. This film offers a portrayal of how elite institutions like Wellesley College, while formally accessible to women, often remained fundamentally shaped by patriarchal values that limit the transformative potential of education. As Adrienne Rich in her seminal commencement speech at Douglass college in 1977 asserts that there is a difference between ‘receiving’ and ‘claiming an education’(Rich, 1995). The students at Wellesley were expected to possibly receive knowledge that will not disturb the conservative social order in the post-cold war era. Basically their intellect is cultivated only insofar as it supports their roles and future wives and mothers the classroom becomes a space of discipline, other than liberation.

In engaging with the film’s portrayal of educational spaces, this essay centers Katherine Watson’s character, not only as an instructor, but as a feminist teacher whose ways of teaching her students become a site of resistance, making her integral to understanding the possibilities and limits of feminist classrooms.

Emerging Challenges through Gendered Locations, Voices and Power Structures:

In line with situated feminist knowledge practices (Haraway, 1988), understanding the historical and social context of Wellesley College in the 1950s is key to interpreting the pedagogical challenges and resistance that unfold for an ‘unorthodox’ teacher like Katherine Watson. It was evident when Betty said, “But Katherine Watson did not come to Wellesley to fit in. She came to Wellesley because she wanted to make a difference” (Newell, 2003, 00:02:12 – 00:02:20). The college, on the other hand, while presented as an elite academic space for women, was deeply embedded in mid-century American ideals of femininity, where education was often framed as a complement to marriage and domestic life. Women students were encouraged to excel intellectually but only within the limits of their future roles as wives and mothers. The faculty were expected to uphold these ideals rather than challenge them. This is crucial because Katherine was in a conflict with this system from the beginning. Her outsider status as an unmarried, working woman from California disrupted the expectations placed on both teachers and students. Hence the film becomes a narrative site for exploring how gendered location of students and teachers affect their agency within the educational spaces.

Though the students in Katherine Watson’s class appear privileged – white, upper-class and well spoken, their lives are governed by gendered expectations of propriety, marriage, and motherhood. The first-class scene itself becomes an emblem of how pedagogies rooted in traditions suppress dialogue and curiosity of students. The students recited textbook facts before Katherine can even begin, leaving a silence in her own classroom. Realising this she reoriented her ways from the next class. She challenges their assumptions by showing them contemporary art they haven’t encountered yet in the syllabi. She also took them to visit new types of art work outside the classroom where she says: “Stop talking and look, you are not required to write a paper. You’re not even required to like it. You are required to consider it” (Newell, 2003, 00:46:14 – 00:46:26).

This moment is central to a critical pedagogical approach. It shifts focus from rote memorization to critical reflection. As Paulo Freire said that education should be dialogic, where learning begins through problem-posing, not prescription (Freire, 2017). Rather than affirming students’ prior knowledge, Katherine encourages them to engage with uncertainty and new perspectives aligning with bell hooks’s call for education as the ‘practice of freedom’ (hooks, 1994). By introducing them to modern art that defied conventional aesthetics and not assigning them to write essays with pre-approved responses, Katherine enabled her students to develop independent thought, which was an act of intellectual liberation in a context that prioritized conformity over critique (Hooks, 1991). Thus the class ceased to be a performance of what they already know and became a space to challenge internalised norms.

Yet resistance is palpable, especially from Betty Warren, a married student who weaponises tradition to criticize Katherine. Betty’s editorials in the campus paper attacks her teachers’ politics and personal life as an extension of the college’s conservative ethos. They reinforce the policing of women’s intellectual autonomy and echo broader cultural anxieties about feminism of the 1950s. She even mocked another teacher and the nurse of the college, Ms. Amanda Armstrong for providing contraceptives to students by writing in her editorial that “our school nurse is little more than a cheerleader for promiscuity” (Newell, 2003, 00:23:55 – 00:23:59). This was an act for which Ms. Armstrong was forced to leave. So we here the editorials play a role in a larger system of institutional oversight. This isn’t about constant watching in a strict sense. It’s more about how peer pressure and moral judgment encourage people to conform. It reinforces Foucault’s notion of surveillance and disciplinary power of the institution. It helps show how institutions control its people by instilling norms and managing behaviours. Betty warns Katherine not to disregard tradition, because she found her teaching ‘political and subversive’, to which Katherine sharply replies:“Don’t disrespect this class, just because you are married”. To which Betty responded, “Don’t disrespect me, because you’re not”(Newell, 01:01:26 – 01:01:38). This exchange also highlights between tradition and transformation – a core challenge of feminist teaching in patriarchal institutions. Katherine doesn’t invalidate marriage, but she resisted the idea that it should define a woman’s identity or limit her participation in intellectual life. She insists on accountability. I also want to acknowledge here that Betty did not benefit much from the patriarchal institution by representing its ideals in her editorials. She and her paper were more of means to build a normative culture of discipline within the institution.

Betty missed six of her classes and forgot to turn in her mid-term but Katherine refused to reduce her standards. Just because she was married, Katherine did not use patronisation to look at Betty as a ‘weak student’ and not supported her by overlooking her ignorance towards education due to marriage like other teachers. She was very clear that she will expect the same level of excellence just like any other student of her class. As bell hooks said in her work, “If the mask of whiteness, the pretense, represents it as always benign, benevolent, then what this representation obscures is the representation of danger, the sense of threat (hooks, 1997: 345)”, but on the contrary Katherine’s insistence on equal accountability is a form of care and respect and not rigidity, where she rejected to be benevolent to Betty, which might have been patronizing her. Care, in Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care framework(1982), is not about sentimentality or being permissive, but about attentiveness, ethical engagement, and listening for what is unspoken. On the face, Katherine’s approach might have looked a little harsh towards Betty but it was out of expectations of engaging with her perspectives. Even when Katherine was interacting with Joan, one of her other students, we see her engaging not just with what is hidden, but also what is socially or emotionally suppressed. When Joan plagiarises an assignment, Katherine calls her out for replicating someone else’s ideas. But instead of dismissing her, she reads her student file and learns Joan once considered going to Law school. In a quite impactful scene, Katherine asks Joan:“If you could go to any law school in the country, which one would you choose?”(Newell, 00:34:11 – 00:34:16). After hesitating a bit Joan finally tells her: “Yale. They have five seats for women, one unofficially for a Wellesley College girl” (Newell, 00:34:19 – 00:34:29). Through this, Katherine not only listens deeply to Joan but also creates spaces for her hidden aspirations to surface. Katherine did not impose an agenda but helped Joan hear herself. She also helps her fill out the law school application, which Joan eventually gets into. But as Joan chooses marriage later, Katherine did not fail here as a teacher. Though her approach of care was different for every student, she was trying to build a relationship with all of them. She tried to hold space for them to consider the implications of their decisions, even when it departed from Katherine’s own hopes. As Nel Noddings (1984) asserted that putting the teacher-student relationship at the heart of education offers a way to serve all students, Katherine was trying to build a relational learning space with the foundational idea that confrontation, autonomy and care are not opposing ideas but they are interwoven within each other.

Feminist Teacher and Feminist Classrooms: Building, Becoming and Being

Stereotypes which suggest that intelligence, expertise, and authority are masculine traits are played out in a complex way for the female teacher (Chalmers and Sutton, 2023). Students and teachers “have been socialized in a culture that has negated and trivialized women’s intellect” (Friedman 1985, p. 206), and it has associated women with nature and emotion, and men with culture and reason. Women teachers often face a struggle to accept their own expertise and this is often reinforced by student attitudes. While Katherine may not be outwardly struggling with asserting her own expertise, the students’ reaction suggests that female authority itself is treated with ambivalence, echoing Friedman’s (1985) argument. A particularly moving scene involves Katherine showing ads from contemporary magazines that reinforce marrow ideals of femininity. Students are asked to deconstruct them, not as consumers, but as critical viewers. When Betty accuses her of forcing students to ‘reject the roles they were born to fill’, Katherine responds with quiet clarity: “I give up. You win. I did not realise that by demanding excellence, I would be challenging the roles you were born to fill. It’s my mistake. Class dismissed” (Newell, 01:10:32 – 01:11:42). Betty’s resistance may not be a rejection of Katherine’s expertise per se, but rather a defence of a system she has internalized for her own survival. Gilligan (1982) might suggest that Betty’s sharpness conceals a moral injury, where her voice is shaped by a need for approval and belonging.

Katherine, in contrast, struggles to recognise Betty’s undervoice and appears to respond more with assertion here than care. I also feel that by saying “I give up, You win,” Katherine articulates her grief in an honest way, which is a feeling a lot of feminist teachers carry affected by the fatigue created by the same patriarchal systems. Katherine’s exhaustion grows through repeated emotional labour, when she was engaging with students like Betty, only to meet with hostility. Despite being a predominantly white classroom, Katherine’s students were a very diverse group of women, if we go through the background stories of the students’ characters like Gisselle, Connie and others. They were all brought up with very different values that come up in their engagement with Katherine at various spaces like the classroom, the wedding and the secret society. Teaching in a resistant context is emotionally taxing, however, to attribute her fatigue solely on students’ resistance would oversimplify the layered dynamics at play. What the film portrays is not a singular ‘oppressed’ classroom but a complex combination of students situated differently within power structures. Betty, for example, is both privileged and constrained – she uses her class position and editorial power to publicly critique Katherine, aligning herself with the social norms, but simultaneously she was being devalued within them. This raises an important question: did Katherine have a pedagogy that could hold both the Bettys and the Joans of her classroom together? The answer will probably be a no here.

bell hooks (1994) insists that feminist pedagogy must attend to both the oppressed and the oppressor, not to punish but to transform. I however feel Katherine seems more invested in the idea of awakening students to a singular feminist consciousness, rather than cultivating a shared, dialogic process of reflection. So her struggle is both pedagogical and ideological because she responds to Betty’s dissent with disappointment, not inquiry. She is unable or perhaps unwilling to engage with Betty’s undervoice, which, as Gilligan (1982) argues, may be expressing internalised moral conflict rather than simple opposition. The inability to listen deeply limited her as a feminist teacher here. Thus, while Katherine’s feminist ideas are sincere and politically sharp, their translation into feminist pedagogy is uneven. She fosters critical thinking in moments, especially with Joan and Giselle but fails to fully open up space for relational learning across differences. The film suggests that feminist teaching is not only about having the right ideas, but also about developing the capacity to listen across ideological and emotional divides, even when faced with confrontations, privilege or pain. I also realised that one of the core challenges of feminist pedagogy is that often its demands for transformation are seen as a personal attack rather than an invite to growth and change. It shows that teaching for liberation is not only emotionally taxing but also politically fraught in spaces that rewards conformity. So Betty’s fierce critique of Katherine lessons or her opinions of Katherine in the editorial could be seen not as a defiance but as defence, a response to feeling threatened by a pedagogy that questions her entire value system.

When Katherine’s male colleague Bill Dunbar criticizes her approach by saying: “You didn’t come here to help people find their own way. You came here to help them find your way” (Newell, 2003, 01:41:07 – 01:41:15), it raises a valid pedagogical concern. Katherine’s approach risks becoming didactic, raising the question: was she teaching feminism, or teaching through a feminist pedagogy rooted in dialogue?

By the end of the film, Katherine is offered to return on the condition that she will strictly follow department rules and syllabus restrictions. She refused to join back however, which shows her commitment to freedom-centered teaching, but also reflects the structural limits of institutional change. While Freire (1970) insists in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed that education must be political, he also emphasises dialogue. Katherine’s teaching sometimes lacks this dialogic humility, especially in her early attempts to correct her students’ views. Freire also suggested that education is either used as ‘an instrument of liberation or domination’ (Freire, 2017). This binary becomes a complex in Katherine’s classroom. Though her intent is liberation, at times her approaches risks replicating the very domination she resists, by denying space for dissents like Betty’s. This was very evident during the scuffle between Katherine and Betty after her marriage as Katherine said, “come to class, do the work, or i’ll fail you” (Newell, 01:01:39 – 01:01:45).

I feel a feminist teacher will always have to walk on this thin line between the two, that demands them to be extra careful on calling out their own transgressions from liberatory practices. As Linda Briskin suggested, contradictory messages about womanhood, about the authority and expertise of female teachers, about strategies for dealing with sexism, about the possibilities for change: all must become part of a self-conscious political approach in a feminist classroom (Briskin, 1994).

Transformation, Politics and Positionality as a Pedagogy:

While Katherine may have attempted to plant seeds of critical thought, the film shows us that transformation is neither immediate, nor guaranteed. Feminist pedagogy, at its best, invites, not imposes new ways of seeing and being. So I would still be hesitating from calling Katherine, a feminist teacher or her classroom, a feminist classroom, because very crucial elements like co-construction of knowledge, care and dialogues were missing. The film offered glimpses of the possibilities, but also reveals the tensions and limits of translating feminist ideals into transformative pedagogy. Importantly, it also shows that the mere presence of a feminist woman may not guarantee a feminist praxis. It must be cultivated, held and often defended within systems that are resistant to change. In our current education systems especially in higher education institutions, we see a constant rising of individualist, neo-liberal values. We are seeing an increasing amount of opinion-based, sometimes alternative right discourses in our university spaces in the guise of free speech, and at the same time very few of the students are taught to critically interrogate or problematise the idea of all institutional knowledge as the ‘objective’, unbiased information (Cole 2018; Giroux 2019).

Keeping this in mind, pedagogy is required to depart from the point of being a tool of transmission to tool of contestation, because positionalities of both teachers and students carry immense political weight in any classroom. While each social group has asserted some meanings and intrinsic discourse in the knowledge production and dissemination, the non-indigenous communities, assume an unearned position of power, by using othering, defining who we are as a society, our practices, and our knowledge systems (Foucault, 1972) as a way of maintaining the “dominance of particular ways of knowing” (Akena, 2012, p.11) and being. Historically, this was related to people who are white, male, heterosexual, able-bodies, English speaking, etc (Choules, 2006)

Katherine Watson is a white, middle-class, western woman, entering an elite American institution in the 1950s. While the film frames her ways of teaching and being in the classroom, as liberatory against the conservative gender norms, an intersectional and decolonised feminist lens compels us to ask: whose liberation is she imagining as a feminist teacher and whose experiences remain slightly invisible in her teaching? Sharmila Rege’s (2006) Against the Madness of Manu demonstrates how her Phule-Ambedkarite feminist viewpoint pedagogy challenges this liberal universalism that eliminates racial, class, and caste distinctions. Although Watson’s “liberation discourse” reflects a liberal feminist emphasis on individual empowerment and personal choice, it does not challenge the ways in which racial exclusivity and class privilege already shape those choices (Mohanty, 1988; Collins, 2000). The major reason behind that, is the timeline when Watson’s classrooms is situated because the idea that the “personal is political” first surfaced later in the 1960s as a result of the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements (Hanisch 1970), and it has since become a fundamental concept in social science and gender discourses. Therefore we do not get to see Katherine help her students practice bridging the gap between their own identities, complicated life histories and the transformational potential of education, as well as reflecting on her own positions of power. This is significant because, as bell hooks (1994) contends in Teaching to Transgress, a teacher who adopts the position of a saviour, or Guru, as noted by Rege (2010) runs the risk of perpetuating imperialist, hierarchical dynamics even while making an effort to be progressive. Paulo Freire also warns against a “banking model” of education in which the instructor imparts information to passive students (Freire, 1970). Despite being innovative for her setting, Katherine’s teaching methods still rely on vertical teacher-student relationships. She does not completely exemplify a co-creation praxis, in which students’ knowledge and experiences are valued as equally significant learning resources. The question of whether Watson’s pupils developed their own counter-narratives or engaged in micro-resistance outside of her authority becomes vital at this point. The movie offers examples of minor breaks in the prevailing patriarchal narrative, such as Joan’s contemplation of law school, Giselle’s sexual independence, and Connie’s self-affirmation. However, Watson’s intervention still primarily frames these instead of recognizing them as social, spontaneous forms of resistance. As feminist pedagogy researchers remind us, true transformation frequently occurs not just in vertical teacher-student interactions but also in horizontal ties of solidarity and peer support (hooks, 1994; Manjrekar, 2020).

This reflection resonates in today’s neoliberal universities, which valorize individual achievement, competition, and employability over collective inquiry and social responsibility (Apple, 2001; Giroux, 2014).  Pedagogy must emphasize positionality and the politics of knowledge creation if it is to withstand being appropriated by neoliberal logics. As Rege (2010) reminds us, Phule-Ambedkarite feminist pedagogy is dialogic and grounded in the perspective of the oppressed; rather than focusing on one enlightened teacher guiding others to liberation, it aims to create common spaces for solidarity, dissent, and counter-narratives. Decolonial academics such as Mignolo (2011) also stress epistemic disobedience, which involves acknowledging different epistemologies and rejecting Eurocentric universalisms. As a result, transformation in the classroom cannot be understood as an individual awakening orchestrated by a charismatic teacher as a personal epiphany, but rather as a collective process in which students create knowledge, express disapproval, and unite in ways that transcend institutional borders. An intersectional and decolonial feminist reading complicates the story by going beyond the liberal feminist frame of Mona Lisa Smile. It challenges Watson’s own positionality, emphasizes students’ micro-resistances as independent, and reimagines pedagogy as a political act of co-creation rather than unilateral instruction.

CONCLUSION

Watching Mona Lisa Smile, with the lens of feminist pedagogy, I found that the most transformative part of the process was not watching the film, as a story or a narrative, but listening to it as a conversation, between Katherine and her students. The film was full of layered voices, interrupted thoughts, and beneath all of them was also silence. Carol Gilligan (1982) urges us to develop an ethic of care that allows us to hear the ‘voices under’—quieter, coded expressions of dissent, longing and fear that often go unheard in hierarchical spaces. Initially, my readings of Katherine Watson, focused on her intentions, her courage, and the institutional constraints she faced. This is also the way I took because I felt that I was probably in a very similar position as a teacher in a classroom setting, full of adolescent girls with diverse backgrounds and opinions about my teaching, ways of being etc. But as I returned to the film again with Gilligan’s framework of listening, I realised that I had also glossed over certain tensions and voices that demanded more patience from my end.

One such voice is Betty’s. At first glance, she appeared to be Katherine’s antagonist, who was angry, cruel and resistant. But when I listened more closely, I began to hear confusion, betrayal, fear embedded in her sharpness. Her editorials, her critiques and her public confrontations were not just about resisting feminisms—they were defending a fragile identity built on conservative social approval. Gilligan’s insight that moral injury often compels women to abandon or distort their own voices made me reconsider Betty’s position. I felt that her hostility towards Katherine was a form of silenced grief, which Katherine, in her passion for change, did not fully respond to. This even helped me ask a deeper question about feminist pedagogy itself. bell hooks wrote that ‘engaged pedagogy’ requires not only courage, but also deep listening to what is said, what is unsaid, and what cannot yet be said. Katherine’s pedagogy did include moments of care and support, especially while listening to Joan. But when she was met with confrontation and resistance, she either withdrew herself or tried to impose her own vision of liberation. So at those moments, her teaching felt more prescriptive than an inquiry that engaged students as collaborators and co-creators of feminist knowledge production, to dismantle multiple interlocking systems of oppression (hooks, 1994). As a former teacher and researcher, it made me think about how quickly we may align with the ‘progressive’ character, and how easily we might ignore the nuances of those who disagree.

In a truly feminist classroom, the task is not just to empower the willing but to remain open, curious and attentive to all—even those who seem oppositional. This kind of listening requires emotional effort, patience and humility. Thus, watching this film more than a few times, I have been learning to listen to myself differently too. I noticed when I rushed to defend Katherine, I overlooked some moments of silence and truth in between the conversations. These moments of silences, or submerged voices are often fragile, fragmented, and buried under the pretext of social conditioning. But they are always there—and as students, teachers, researchers, we owe it to them to listen, not for content, but for context; not only for argument, but for meaning. Seeing the silences is a political act in and of itself; it challenges the liberal urge to speak for others and invites us to sit with uneasiness and unfinishedness. The most radical feminist education may not be providing solutions, but rather developing the ability to hear what is hardly said and to let those subtle traces change the way we think.

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