This book is a meditation on the profession of teaching from the perspective of a woman whose intellectual identity as teacher and writer is inseparable from her whole life as a woman. Pagano brings the methods and insights of feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism to bear on a reading of her own educational practice in order to reach a transformed understanding of the educational enterprise. She raises serious questions: How are we implicated in what we know? What actions are required by our knowledge? Responses to these questions are given with probing analyses of practice, ethics, gender, knowledge, and curriculum. In Exiles and Communities: Teaching in the Patriarchal Wilderness Jo Anne Pagano teaches us how to teach as she sustains identity in transformation and relinquishes neither the world nor other people to thought.