A feminist post-transsexual autoethnography on challenging normative gender coercion

This in-depth analysis of the autoethnographic subject's life has shed considerable light on the transgender condition, particularly in terms of improving their social determinates of health, psychological wellbeing, agency and in leading more creative livable lives. It also sheds considerable light on the normative operation of gender in society.

A Feminist post-transsexual autoethnography on challenging normative gender coercion.

This in-depth analysis of the autoethnographic subject's life has shed considerable light on the transgender condition, particularly in terms of improving their social determinates of health, psychological wellbeing, agency and in leading more creative livable lives. It also sheds considerable light on the normative operation of gender in society.

Down the methodological rabbit hole: thinking diffractively with resistant data

This article, part of a larger study, began with an inquiry into the ways a small group of preteen boys and girls with diagnosed eating disorders discussed their ideas and attitudes about healthy bodies in individual interviews. Despite applying some of the usual analytic procedures, the data yielded little of significance in relation to body and health discourses, or to gender differences. We therefore wondered whether our underlying epistemological lenses and methodological toolkit had prevented us from seeing and hearing what was happening with this particular cohort. By shifting from a predominantly feminist post-structuralist, socio-cultural approach to one more inflected with varieties of feminist post-humanism and post-qualitative thinking, the data came differently into focus, and invited closer consideration. Employing a diffractive analysis then allowed some fresh, unexpected salience in the data to become more apparent.

Tracking the nomadic life of the eductional researcher: what future for feminist public intellecturals and the performative university?

Is the idea of the liberal university dead, has the postmodern university any chance of being emancipatory, has the theory–practice divide merely collapsed in an era of 'new knowledge work', or has the university just become one aspect of market states and global capitalism? Knowledge-based economies locate universities as central to the commodification and management of knowledge, while at the same time the legitimacy of the university and the academic as knowledge producers is challenged by postmodernist, feminist, post-colonial and indigenous claims within a wider trend towards the 'democratisation of knowledge' and a new educational instrumentalism and opportunism. What becomes of the educational researcher, and indeed their professional organisations, in this changing socio-political and economic scenario? Is our role one of policy service, policy critique, technical expert or public intellectual? In particular what place is there for feminist public intellectuals in a so-called era of post feminism and public–private convergence? The paper draws on feminist and critical perspectives to mount a case for the importance of the public intellectual in the performative postmodern university.

Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times

Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls' agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls' and young women's agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls' studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question.

Seeing the unseen : a rockclimbing experience

This article outlines a process of using critical incidents to reflect on professional practice. The process begins, in this article, by observing and describing an 'incident' in a rock climbing teaching experience. Then, through a feminist post-structuralist lens, this 'ordinary' educational experience is analysed to reveal some of the underlying tendencies, patterns and values directing practice. Particular attention is given to exposing my role in maintaining and reproducing dominant discourses relating to socially differentiated gender identities. Finally, I explore pedagogies that will help lead students to understand their own and others' identities and provide alternative ways of being and valuing.

Stepping out of our comfort zones: pre-service teachers' responses to a critical analysis of gender/power relations in sexuality education

This paper discusses pre-service teachers' responses to a critical analysis of gender/power relations using examples from a final assessment for an intensive elective unit called Teaching Sexuality in the Middle Years. This unit critically examines gender/ power relations, the production of difference, heteronormativity and pleasure and desire, employing a feminist post-structural framework. Despite the focus on critical thinking, reflection and interrogating structural inequalities in this unit some students were resistant or unable to engage with this approach in their assessments, although appearing to do so in workshops. We consider the broad range of sexuality education discourses mobilised by this unit to try to make sense of what looks like resistance but may be something more complex and difficult to negotiate. The paper ends with a consideration of some of the implications of this approach for practice.

Schooling for self-determination through a justice politics of Indigenous representation

This paper presents data from a study of secondary school for girls, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous Australian. ‘Gamarada’ High School is located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia) and was established to provide quality education for disadvantaged girls. The paper draws on student and teacher interview data from a broader study that was concerned with examining how the school addressed the economic, cultural and political dimensions of Indigenous girls’ disadvantage. The focus here is on issues of political justice in relation to Indigenous representation and, more specifically, how such representation at the school supports the key Indigenous equity priority of self-determination. Feminist post-colonial theories are drawn on to argue the importance of educators engaging with a politics of representation that initiates theory from the social location of Indigenous experience, reflects an anti-racist/anti-colonial agenda and recognises and values the central role relationality plays in Indigenous lives.

Gender inequality and education : changing local/global relations in a ‘post colonial’ world and the implications for feminist research

This article explores the relationship between education reform and gender equity, both within and between nation states. Utilising feminist critical policy analysis and post-colonial theory, it examines how education reform over the past decade has impacted on gender equity, and how educational reform is itself gendered. It considers the nature of gender restructuring; maps significant shifts in gender equity policy in the wider context of educational and social inequality debates; and through an analysis of recent research on gender identity, schooling and leadership argues that gender can no longer be privileged when identifying and responding to educational inequality. Key assumptions underpinning how social change and education reform delivers equity are questioned, concluding with feminist theorising about how social justice may inform equity policy and practice in culturally diverse educational contexts.

Gender inequality and education: changing local/global relations in a ‘post-colonial’ world and the implications for feminist research

This chapter explores the relationship between education reform and gender equity, both within and between nation states. Utilising feminist critical policy analysis and post-colonial theory, it examines how education reform over the past decade has impacted on gender equity and how educational reform is itself gendered. It considers the nature of gender restructuring, maps significant shifts in gender equity policy in the wider context of educational and social inequality debates and, through an analysis of recent research on gender identity, schooling and leadership, argues that gender can no longer be privileged when identifying and responding to educational inequality. Key assumptions underpinning how social change and education reform deliver equity are questioned, concluding with feminist theorising about how social justice may inform equity policy and practice in culturally diverse educational contexts.

The implementation of feminist law reforms: the case of post-provocation sentencing

In 2005 the Australian State of Victoria abolished the controversial partial defence of provocation. Part of the impetus for the reforms was to challenge provocation’s victim-blaming narratives and the defence’s tendency to excuse men’s violence against intimate partners. However, concerns were also expressed that these narratives and excuses would simply reappear at the sentencing stage when men who had killed intimate partners were convicted of murder or manslaughter. This paper analyses post-provocation sentencing judgments, reviewing cases over the 10 year period since the reforms in order to determine whether these concerns have been borne out. The analysis suggests that at the level of sentencing outcomes they have not, although at the level of discourse the picture is more mixed. While sentencing narratives continue to reproduce the language of provocation, at the same time, post-provocation sentencing appears to provide opportunities for feminist judging – picking up on the spirit of the reforms – which have been taken up by some judges more than others.

Subcultural capital and the female 'underclass'? A feminist response to an underclass discourse

It is often argued that economically marginalized young women occupy a school and post-school underclass, and that this underclass has a particular culture associated with it. Such views provoke a profound ambivalence in many of those who work with such young people. On the one hand, they are anxious to acknowledge the culture of the communities to which marginalized young women belong. On the other hand, they wish to avoid the pernicious implications of underclass theories that suggest disadvantage is the result of the culture and values of marginalized social groupings. This paper offers an overview and feminist critique of the structuralist and cultural or behaviourist strands of underclass theory. It focuses particularly on the work of Charles Murray, a major proponent of the culturalist perspective and the representation of the single mother in this discourse. It then considers how a less punitive theorization of marginalized cultures might be achieved by drawing on and adapting concepts from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. The paper reflects on how such ideas might serve as a way of exploring how gender impacts on the forms of cultural capital available to young women in difficult economic circumstances.