Session Information
13 SES 06, Sexual Difference, Living in the Senses
Long Paper Session
Contribution
In a project currently exploring how sexual difference in the upper secondary classes of Religious Studies, Science and Swedish manifest themselves, what has become crystal clear to us as researchers is how similar the new curriculum within these subject areas are in their use of the language of 'learning outcomes' and 'purposes' of instruction. For example, what we are noticing is the way in which across all three subjects areas the curriculum emphasize certain practices, easily characterized in terms of skills – of speech, of participation, of team work. So although certain subjects are perceived to be reflective of different disciplinary content, there is in light of the felt objectives of evaluation in each of the subject areas a disturbing sameness.
Such sameness, I argue in this paper, is fundamentally tied to the very language in which this curriculum is expressed. The language used reveals not only how the aims and objectives of certain subjects serve a particular economic outlook, but also how they serve a particularly western, patriarchal sense of ‘business as usual’. It is not so much that this language of the curriculum is ‘masculine’, although certain arguments could be made along these lines, but that the whole direction of knowledge formation is to be captured in terms that are fixed, regulatory, and monolithic. According to feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1985, 1993a, 2008), such formations reflect a certain type of morphology that is solid and static, instead of one that is more fluid and flexible. In so doing, it produces patriarchal images of masculinity and femininity. A masculinity based on a morphology that sees knowledge and learning as sameness. This means that a femininity based on this same morphology corresponds to what she refers to as the ‘specular’ feminine (Irigaray, 1985). By this she means that patriarchal discourses have created an image of femininity that mirrors its own desires; it produces a culture in which the feminine has been ‘contained’ (and then devalued).
As a point for counter analysis, then, Irigaray (1993a, 2008) posits the idea that a culture without relationality between the masculine and feminine is a culture based on sameness. This thereby creates an inability to recognize difference – a recognition which would allow new forms of cultural expression to emerge. In using language based on a single morphology, everyone and everything is reduced to a numbing oneness. In this sense, following her line of thinking, knowledge in schools is being constructed in ways that glide over the complex relationality underpinning how we come to know, experience, and create. However, added to this ‘specular’ form of femininity, Irigaray also suggests that in order to create a culture that better expresses the relationality of sexual difference, other languages, metaphors, and grammars can be mobilized – ones that reflect a new form of femininity than that designated by patriarchal standards. Thus, to re-imagine curricular knowledge as being more reflective of sexual difference would require introducing alternative depictions of knowledge beyond the measurable skills and competencies currently on offer. Here, I particularly focus on the significance of metaphor. Metaphors are akin to what Deleuze and Guattari (2009) say of a concept:‘it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created’ (p. 22). A concept generates a certain landscape of 'reality' in creating new objects of thought. Metaphors, like concepts in this sense, approximate and focus our attention on certain 'things' rather than others, and in fact bring into being certain relationships that would not have been possible before.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2009. What is Philosophy? Translated by G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson. London: Verso. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993a. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993b. Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Translated by A. Martin. New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 2008. Sharing the World. London: Continuum. Popkewitz, T. 2008. Cosmopolitanism and The Age of School Reform: Science, Education and Making Society By Making The Child. New York: Routledge. Ringarp, Johanna. 2013. "From Bildung to Entrepreneurship: Trends in Educational Policy in Sweden." Policy Futures in Education 11 (4):456-464.
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