Gettin’ a little crafty: Teachers Pay Teachers©, Pinterest© and neo-liberalism in new materialist feminist research

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I share data from a year-long study investigating the manifestations of neo-liberalism in the working lives of five women elementary school teachers in the United States. I discuss how gendered discourses of neo-liberalism construct what is understood as possible in the material-discursive production of the women’s subjectivities concerning a surprising market created by teachers for teachers that is largely promoted through the social media site, Pinterest©: Teachers Pay Teachers©. Utilising new materialist feminist theory [Braidotti, R. 2000. “Teratologies.” In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by I. Buchanan, and C. Colebrook, 156–172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Dolphijn, R., and I. van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press], I analyse how the teachers intra-act [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] with curricular material actants [Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] that have the capacity to alter the course of events in women’s work and lives. I argue that these material actants further entangle the material-discursive, virtual-real production of subjectivity and influence women teachers in variegated but particularly gendered ways that ultimately reinforce emerging theories around the gendered nature of neo-liberal subjectivity [Gill, R. 2008. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times.” Subjectivity 25 (1): 432–445. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.28; Walkerdine, V. 2003. “Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-liberal Subject.” Gender and Education 15: 237–248. doi:10.1080/09540250303864].