Feminist Pedagogy and the Politics of Transformation in Mona Lisa Smile

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.