This presentation will address the issue of agency and how Butler’s notion of resignification is a useful conceptual tool for rethinking the political arena and working through educational disadvantage. The following questions guide the presentation:

• How useful is Judith Butler’s notion of resignification for rethinking and addressing educational exclusion for students inscripted as ‘disadvantaged’?
• What might resignification ‘look like’ within a school residing in an area labelled as low socio-economic?

The ‘post-structuralist turn’ in educational research unsettled the fixity of identity categories being used to address educational exclusion. Categories such as ‘female’ and ‘educationally disadvantaged’ have often been used by many policy makers around the world to help improve student access to educational opportunity. Attempts to improve access to educational success have subsequently faced the problem of reifying the very categories that students have been inscripted into, thus raising doubts about the effectiveness of an approach to equity which is based around issues of recognition. Within feminist and queer theory, Judith Butler has troubled the identity category ‘woman’ and thus the foundational principle from which much feminist politics is launched. While this radical deconstruction of identity categories may be labelled by some as consequently annihilating room for agency and thus political subversion, I believe this to be a narrow reading of Butler’s work. Agency has too often been associated with mass political change and operationalised on a more broad and systemic level, and by doing this, reinscribed inequality. Power in a productive sense has, therefore, come to be associated with a model of agency that works on the macro level. Power has come to be commonly associated with resistance. Butler’s notion of agency (of which resignification is central) does not conform to this idea. Butler’s version of agency works more on the level of the individual, thus misaligning with the common notion of how agency works and/or should be enacted. Butler’s theory of agency is not, in my opinion, about resistance. It is about working through power structures that are constraining.

Butler’s ideas within the world of feminist philosophy have received wide-spread coverage, but the uptake of her work, and resultant ideas about how agency can be enacted, are not so commonly used within the educational sphere. Her conceptual ideas have utility for examining educational ‘disadvantage’ more broadly.

Butler’s version of agency works more on an individual level. This presentation will, therefore, use data generated from a case study secondary school in Queensland, Australia, to problematise the labelling of students as ‘non-aspirational’ and ‘generationally impoverished’. It will also show how Butler’s theory of subject formation does contain capacity for altering educational constraint. While the data presented is from one country, the purpose of the presentation is to illustrate the utility of Butler’s theory concerning agency. I aim to provide an empirical backdrop for Butler’s philosophical ideas. This has applicability for anyone within an educational setting attempting to re-imagine the political arena and initiate change without reifying the categories students are inscripted into.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York : Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Webster, F. (2000). The politics of sex and gender: Benhabib and Butler debate subjectivity. Hypatia, 15(1), 1-22. Rasmussen, M L. (2009). Beyond gender identity? Gender and Education, 21(4), 431-447.