Towards a Pedagogy of Sexual Difference: education and female genealogy

ABSTRACT

The equality‐difference antinomy found in pedagogy today cannot be resolved within the neuter/masculine logic of pedagogic discourse and political theories of education, if by difference we mean sexual difference. This antinomy will be resolved by the historical realisation of a ‘sexualised’ order, that is, by splitting into two the subject that possesses and transmits knowledge, that educates and theorises on education (bi‐sexualisation of the pedagogic logos). The pedagogic ideal of universality can take on substance only if it becomes twofold. Societies in which emancipation and equal opportunities policies are highly developed allow the fulfilment of women as (neuter?) human beings, but they minimise or cancel the fact that these beings belong to the female gender. It is time we freed ourselves from subjection to the male subject's educational theories and practices, which refer back to a patriarchal genealogy centred on the father‐son couple, and that take and rely on women as the sources of authority for our educational activity and for our work of conceptualising the principles and forms of this activity. We should (re)construct a female genealogy centred on the symbolic mother‐daughter couple, which has been cancelled by patriarchal culture. We need a female gender ‘transcendence’, so that the measure of our improvement as human beings will not be the male, but a female source of values.