Educational heterotopias and the self

Abstract

This article looks at the first university-associated colleges in the United Kingdom at the turn of the nineteenth century, and at how the first women students of these colleges lived within the limits of their society, but also beyond them, in yet unrecognised ‘different social spaces’, which Foucault has described as heterotopias. In Foucault's analyses of space, heterotopias contest the real space in which we live, creating transitional spaces and sheltering subjects in crisis. In this light, the notion of heterotopia becomes instrumental in the analyses of the constitution of the female self in education at the turn of the nineteenth century. The author suggests that in the genealogical analysis of women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, the effects of power were not as important as the subjective capacities that were being developed in women's attempt to resist the power that had made them what they were. Through these technologies of resistance, women began to fashion new forms of subjectivity, always oscillating between the ‘unbearable lightness and heaviness of being’, by adopting unstable positions between them.