Feminism, power and pedagogy: editors’ introduction

In 2015, the Tenth Biennial Gender and Education Association Conference on the theme of Feminism, Power and Pedagogy was held at the University of Roehampton. The conference was, as those who were there will remember, vibrant, with many wonderful papers from a truly international set of contributors. As the two lead organisers of the conference, we were keen to produce a special issue of Gender and Education on the same themes as the conference. This special issue, also entitled Feminism, Power and Pedagogy, is the result.

This conference was concerned with power – how it operates and how its different dimensions intersect and/or are articulated in a range of formal and informal educational settings and geographical and organisational contexts. It examined how power influences educational and pedagogic processes, what counts as knowledge and who is authorised to produce it – an enduring and highly significant theme in the field of education. While gender is increasingly being seen and understood as a mainstream and ‘soft’ concept, the theme of the conference, and, therefore, our special issue, called for its radical and political reconceptualisation. Simultaneously, it explored how feminist and other critical researchers and activists could challenge established power relationships and work together towards the promotion of equality in relation to education and other dimensions of the social world. It therefore sought to explore different dimensions of power and varied ways of analysing it, particularly through a range of Northern and Southern theories, but also in dialogue with subaltern, critical race and postcolonial theories to only cite a few.

In our call for papers, we thus sought contributions from engaging with questions of power in education in relation to gender and other ‘differences that make a difference’ (such as nation, geography, race, class, sexuality and dis/ability). We defined all the terms in our title broadly, taking feminism to include a range of ways of understanding gender and power, relating these to other inequalities, and, for political reasons sometimes called by other names (like Alice Walker’s coinage, ‘womanism’). Similarly, we took the terms ‘education’ and ‘pedagogy’ to include not only the formal, apparent methods of and approaches to teaching offered in educational institutions like schools and universities, and the hidden curricula such organisations, but also the informal and often unnoticed pedagogies of, for example, material and popular cultures. We were certainly successful in attracting a range of papers that did precisely this, though we were disappointed not to be able to fulfil our desire for this special issue to be a forum for feminist engagements with and development of Southern theory in relation to education and pedagogy. While acknowledging our failure in this respect, we are nonetheless very happy with the papers that were submitted for the special issue, plus one from South Africa (Mayeza, this issue) that was already in process. We thought the paper fitted the scope of the SI well, providing a different lens on the power and gendered pedagogies of children’s play at school.

The special issue begins with a paper by Penny Jane Burke, one of our keynote speakers at the conference. Her focus, here, is on shame as a productive force for inequalities in higher education. She argues that, in these individualising, neoliberal times, shame is privatised, hidden and ‘deeply entangled with the gendered politics of maldistribution, misrecognition, misrepresentation and embodied intersections of difference’ (Burke 2017). From this perspective, Burke shows how important the cultural politics (and sociology) of emotions are in considering inequalities, power and pedagogy. When both academics and students operate from a place of shame, which is felt in embodied ways, the impact is manifold and multiplied, and both constraining and resulting in misrecognition, restricting students’ (and staff’s) sense of self. She concludes that we need to engage explicitly with emotion in order to develop pedagogies that trouble and disrupt inequalities and binary divisions in the way we conceptualise difference.

The next paper also deal with feminist pedagogies in higher education. Geraldine McCusker interrogates the processes and tensions involved in her efforts to establish a feminist pedagogic space in an UK university. As she notes, there is no singular meaning to the term ‘feminist pedagogy’. Rather, there are many forms of feminist pedagogy (as there are different forms of feminism). What they all share, however, is that their purpose is to value the lives and experiences of women, while also encouraging all students to participate and trying to reduce and combat inequalities. Like Burke, McCusker is influenced by the ideas of Paulo Freire ([1996] 1972) and Henri Giroux (1988, 2003) and critical pedagogy more generally. Refreshingly, this is not a paper that merely celebrates success, but carefully explores and acknowledges tensions and the discomfort felt by some of her students as well as the inevitable contradiction between the inherent power of the teacher in relation to students and the attempt to equalise relationships. She also acknowledges that her efforts to create a feminist space made her the recipient of much student distress in a way that was, as always, an unacknowledged and invisible part of (many) women’s work in the academy and the toll this takes even while she tried to avoid this. Her conclusion is, however, hopeful as she argues that the tensions, discomforts and difficulties met along the way can be negotiated.

Debbie Ollis’s paper is concerned with feminist pedagogies designed to address Violence Against Women (VAW) in Sexuality and Relationships Education (SRE) in three secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia. She deploys Jones (2011) discourse analysis in SRE programmes and policies, which Jones categorises as falling within four different orientations: Conservative, Liberal, Critical and Postmodern to explore the different approaches adopted by the feminist teachers in her study. The first approach discussed is one that Ollis identifies as liberal, with a focus on socialised-gendered behaviours. In this case, the strategies adopted are focused on raising the awareness of both girls and boys, with the intention that they will relearn different and more respectful behaviours. The second approach Ollis examines is one based on analysis of media, sexualisation and pornography, which Jones categorises as falling within the Critical orientation. As she shows, quoting the students’ work, they expressed both increased understanding and strongly emotional responses to this material. While this approach is powerful, Ollis argues that it conveys essentialist ideas about men and women. Women are victims and men are aggressors. Ollis acknowledges that such approaches need to be managed carefully so that they do not become too grounded in such essentialist ideas. At the same time, she argues that the power of emotion could help ‘understand how this can be activated for social change to prevent violence against women’ (Ollis 2017, 1–15). Ollis concludes with a discussion of Jones’ Postmodern orientation. Here she notes that the teachers did try to deconstruct binaries, but found it difficult, if not impossible, to translate feminist poststructuralist theory into practice.¹ She ends the paper by suggesting that feminist poststructuralists should produce resources for such work – a challenge that has already been taken up by Emma Renold working with the NSPCC and with the support of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Sally Holland, and the Welsh Assembly Government (available online at http://www.agenda.wales/all_resources/14_pdf_guide/english_agenda.pdf).

Emmanuel Mayeza offers an ethnographic study of a South African township primary school focusing on the playground and, specifically, on football. In doing so, he explores the practices of gender policing that the children, aged 6–10 years, deploy in their efforts not only to ‘do’ gender performatively but to enforce normative gendered stereotypical behaviours. He argues that much, if not all, of this policing takes the form of boys bullying both girls and other boys who do not conform to the desirable, hegemonic forms of masculinity. Methodologically, he follows the lead offered in the childhood studies of engaging with the children in as egalitarian manner as he can achieve, given that he is, after all, an adult. The girls in this study struggled to position themselves as footballers. Those who did had to join in with the boys’ games, in conditions which laid them open to sexist abuse with, in particular, the epithet ‘tomboy’, used in this context as a pejorative term. This contrasts with the experiences of girl footballers in schools that provide girls’ only time on the football pitch (Epstein et al. 2001). While the girls who played football were called ‘tomboys’, boys who agreed to play football with girls were labelled as ‘gay’. In this way non-normative gendered performances by both girls and boys were constrained and even punished.

The next paper in our collection is concerned with what Susan McCullough calls the ‘girls’ paradoxical response ‘to sexism at [their middle] school' (McCullough, 2017). She conceives of these responses as propagating a post-feminist ideology (though not consciously so), arguing that there is an assumption of equality which does not meet with their experiences of, for example, sexual and sexist harassment both in an out of school and in some of the policies of their school – and that the girls embrace the ‘tenets of postfeminism, such as individual responsibility’ and ‘disinvestment and disavowals of feminist thinking’ (Ringrose 2013, 57). She argues that the strategies girls adopted to deal with this harassment could (and should) be described as post-feminist in that they are about individual rather than collective action. In contrast to the earlier generation of young women described in Epstein (1996) in which she explored how the young women in one woodwork class agreed that they would all wear stiletto heels on the relevant day and stamp on their harassing teacher’s foot hard when he touched them up, the girls in McCullough’s study had a range of individual approaches such as fighting back when they experienced unwanted physical touches to ignoring the unwanted advances of older men in the street and on public transport. While McCullough recognises the girls’ practices as agentic, she expresses and justifies convincingly the need to be troubled by their embrace of post-feminist individualism over collective action.

Mirelsie Velazquez’s paper, in contrast, is very much about the collective action of Latina women in Chicago in relation to their children’s schooling. She begins by explaining how a group of Mexican American women (mothers, grandmothers and other community members) undertook a 19-day hunger strike to demand that the promised school in their community should actually be built when Chicago Public Schools had chosen, instead, to build a new school in an advantaged area of the city. This led to the city of Chicago providing the money required to build the promised high school in the local, impoverished community, and involved the community in the development of the relevant curriculum. From this starting point, she discusses other acts of collective resistance by Latina mothers and theorises such actions as a form of love as well as of resistance.

The last paper in the special issue is not a research paper but a very personal, reflective account by Miriam David of her experiences of publishing two books in 2016 and the everyday misogyny that she encountered along the way. As editors, we felt it important to include this Viewpoint, because our quotidian experiences are a form of pedagogy. Through them, we were taught our places in a range of hierarchies – within and outside the academy. The difficulties experienced by David, despite her well-established reputation as a feminist scholar of note, indicate to us all that the path by feminist academics is (still) not easy. In her Viewpoint, she illustrates this and exemplifies the ways in which the personal is still political (but the political is not only personal).

Acknowledgements

We are profoundly grateful to all the authors whose work appears in this special issue. It was a pleasure to work with them and we appreciate the tremendous effort they made to meet our tight deadlines. We are also grateful to those authors who submitted papers but whose work did not make the final cut, primarily because the deadlines were so tight, as well as to Helen Rowlands, the Editorial Manager of Gender and Education. Without her constant support and work above and beyond the call of duty we would not have been able to complete putting the issue together. Thank you also to the previous editors of the journal (Jo-Anne Dillabough, Gabrielle Ivinson, Julie McLeod and Maria Tamboukou) for their support for our proposal and their useful comments on it and to the current editors for their help in reviewing papers and supporting the production of the issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Debbie Epstein is Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Roehampton. She was co-editor of Gender and Education from 2006 to 2012 and a founding member of the Gender and Education Association.

Marie-Pierre Moreau is Reader in Sociology of Education and Director of the RISE (Research in Inequalities, Societies and Education) Research Centre, School of Education, University of Roehampton (UK).

Notes

1. As editors of this special issue, we would wish to insist on maintaining a distinction between poststructuralist and postmodern theory – the former being based in social sciences and built on understandings of social structures, sociolinguistics and power, the latter coming primarily from literary and aesthetic studies and movements in arts.