The Promise of Freedom and the Regulation of Gender-feminist pedagogy in the 1970s

Abstract

This article argues that we need to understand feminist interventions- in education and other social domains- as both emancipatory and disciplining. While it is acknowledged that feminist reforms have made many positive and desirable changes in education, this article addresses the impact of these reforms from another perspective. It analyses the normative ambitions and the utopian hopes of feminist education and suggests that the Foucauldian concepts of 'technologies of the self' and 'governmentality' offer new and fruitful ways for theorising the relation between (feminist) strategies of social, educational and personal reform. These arguments are explored in dialogue with a historical case study of 1970s feminist pedagogical reforms in Australia. The article interprets pedagogical strategies based on sex-role socialisation models as developing techniques for regulating and remaking the self and as productive of feminist truths about gender identity and difference. These pedagogies articulated feminist ambitions to reform the sex role and to produce non-sexist, self-monitoring and androgynous pupils. Such attempts to remake gender illustrate some of the ways in which feminism, while a critical social movement which has achieved genuinely emancipatory outcomes, is also necessarily a governmental and normative practice. Finally, this article underlines the imperative for properly historical and self-reflexive accounts of familiar and favoured narratives about the promise of feminism.