Dinosaur discourses: taking stock of gendered learning myths

Abstract

The persistence of gendered learning myths in educational contexts and the wider imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of such myths and the categories they create through authoritative and elite discourses of the past suggests how they have functioned across different fields to preserve a hierarchised binary. Gendered myths seem to be lent authority by some of the more popular claims of contemporary neuroscience as they were by the nascent Victorian psychological sciences. Adopting Le Doeuff's [2003. The Sex of Knowing. Translated by K. Hamer and L. Code. London: Routledge] heuristic of identifying which attributes are absorbed into masculine intellectual legacies and which ‘cast off’ to women allows for a focus on patterns of privileging of learning discourses across the humanities and sciences, and the ways these are constituted in historical and contemporary contexts.

Keywords:

• gender
• learning
• elite
• genealogy
• feminist
• Le Doeuff

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.