This paper offers a speculative feminist engagement with the European tradition of Bildung in order to reconsider gender in higher education. It situates Bildung not purely as an individual goal but as a process of ecologies and relationships and argues that critical utopian thinking might enable us to envisage a better, more optimistic future for education. The paper builds on previous work on Bildung (Taylor, 2016a) and new material feminist theory (Taylor, 2013, 2016b), and combines these with the concept of utopia (Webb, 2016) to re-think gender and Bildung in a feminist utopian theoretical frame. This theoretical-critical rethinking revolves around three questions: 1. What are the historical and contemporary articulations of Bildung, gender equality and education? 2. How might feminist theory and feminist politics recast the promise of Bildung in a wider frame? 3. How can the concept of utopia be useful in re-imagining Bildung? Freire argued that having a vision of a world in which we would like to live is necessary to propel us along the path towards that better future (Freire, 1996). Likewise, Webb (2016: 444) argues the need for the ‘critical, imaginative and catalyzing power of utopia’ to enable us to propose holistic imaginaries to contest the prevailing capitalist commonsense which seeks to condition us to think that there are ‘no alternatives to the present’. Against this, Webb (2016) proposes utopian thinking as a method and practice for the imagined reconstitution of society in which a different mode of education can be envisaged. I use Webb (2016) and Levitas’s (2013) notion of utopia in this paper. The ‘imagining forwards’ I do brings Bildung as a mobile concept (Taylor, 2016a) into alliance with new material feminist theory (Taylor, 2013) to recast the aims, purposes and goals of higher education. I propose that Bildung has much to gain from an ecologically-inflected ethics of response-ability, in which Haraway’s (2016) sense of ‘ongoingness’ with earth others on a damaged planet, and Barad’s (2007) argument that entanglement is a material-discursive mattering are central. Within this utopian feminist framing, I imagine forwards to Bildung as a matter of knowing-in-being-and-doing. I suggest that Bildung as a materially emplaced sensory knowing enables us both to ask new and different questions about gender and education, and also to reimagine Bildung as an educative practice oriented to making a material and practical difference in and for the world and its (and, therefore, our) future.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway—quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Freire, P. (1996) Letters to cristina. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. Levitas, R. (2013) Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. Abingdon: Palgrave. Taylor, C. A. (2013) ‘Objects, bodies and space: Gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom’, Gender and Education, Vol. 25, issue 6, pp. 688–703. Taylor, C. A. (2016a) ‘Is a posthumanist Bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of Bildung for contemporary higher education,’ Higher Education, published online 23 March 2016.doi:10.1007/s10734-016-9994-y. Taylor, C. A. (2016b) ‘Close encounters of a critical kind: A diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology,’ Cultural Studies<=>Critical Methodologies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 201–212. Webb, D. (2016) ‘Educational studies and the domestication of utopia’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 64, No. 4, pp. 431–448.