I must stress that empowerment, per se, is not an anti-feminist principle; rather, it is liberal humanism’s preoccupation with individual empowerment that is problematic, because the individual is inevitably placed in a fixed, isolated, self-defeating subject position. That is, the conventional conception of empowerment positions people as self-interested individuals battling over a precious, limited resource. And in terms of pedagogy, a “major shortcoming of constructions of empowerment in critical and feminist pedagogy discourses,” according to Jennifer Gore, “is that they conceive of power as property, something the teacher has and can give to students. To em-power is to suggest that power can be given, provided, controlled, held, conferred, taken away” (57). In other words, power is typically treated as a quantifiable, measurable substance; it is property--and above all, private property.