Voicing the `Other'. Speaking for the `Self'. Disrupting the metanarratives of educational theorizing with poststructural feminism(s)

Abstract

This paper reviews the literature on the "forth wave" new sociology of education which attempted to incorporate poststructuralist theories, mainly Foucault and feminist poststructuralist analysis, into an interpretation of schooling. Poststructural feminist theorisations of education are, for the purposes of analysis, categorised as; phenomenological (Davies, 1993; in press), cultural Marxist (Gilbert & Taylor, 1991), psychoanalytic (Walkerdine, 1990)6 and feminist theories of pedagogy (Luke & Gore, 1992). The paper compares and contrasts two major concepts elaborated in this poststructural feminist corpus of literature, namely: (1) discourse and positioning and (2) power/knowledge relations. The paper also critiques this literature, focussing specifically on the ways in which it celebrates `difference' and local contexts of power/knowledge relations without examining the uniform structures of state education systems across the world today. Under the conditions of reorganised global capitalism in the latter part of the 20th century there exists a uniformity in the structure of schooling systems. That is, the pedagogic device by which power and control relations are relayed through schooling systems across national boundaries is similar. The focus on difference and the local fails to account for this global similarity across education systems (Bernstein, 1990).