Feminist interventions that assume a liberal approach work within the system to correct problems.

Feminist interventions that assume a liberal approach work within the

system to correct problems. Whereas leftist approaches to feminism consider

the social order to be systematically unequal, liberal approaches

assume that inequity is a consequence of ignorance or prejudice and thus

something that gradually can be modified through enlightened educational

programs and corrective policies such as affirmative action. While

liberal theorists raise important objections to and criticisms of the prevailing

order, they also take many of their values and standards from the

dominant social order, recalling society to a more fully realized and more

rigorously applied appreciation of some of the values it already holds.

Socialization Theory

Early second-wave feminist analyses sought to discredit the sexist view that

because girls tended to perform poorly in “masculine” subjects such as

math and science, they were incapable of meeting high intellectual standards.

As long as teachers and parents did not treat girls unfairly or missocialize

them into thinking they could not do well in difficult subjects,

socialization theorists argued, girls could meet the same academic standards

as boys.

By providing all children with gender-neutral education and

eliminating other obstacles to female success, schools would not only

ensure fairness but would increase the pool of skilled workers, thereby benefiting

society as a whole.

Apart from a few compensatory gestures (such as inviting female role

models to visit the classroom or staging occasional math and science workshops

for girls), the pedagogical interventions called for by socialization

theory are fairly straightforward: if girls are to flourish, teachers, parents,

and administrators need to treat girls in the same ways that they treat boys.

Of course, the difficulty lies in implementation. Not only do teachers have

to want to treat boys and girls equally, but they have to overcome their own

socialized perceptions of how they treat girls and boys. As Barbara Houston

points out, a feminist teacher may fully intend to give as much attention

to girls as to boys and yet spend half as much time with them, all the while

believing that she is being more than fair.  Even if the teacher succeeds

in being gender neutral, moreover, she is dependent on a larger support

system for her efforts to have any positive effect. Without textbooks and

other media that treat women and girls in interesting and significant ways,

a teacher’s efforts to provide a representative and even-handed curriculum

will appear biased and “subjective.” Unless parents and other teachers

support feminist teachers’ initiatives to treat boys and girls equally, the corrective

efforts of the solitary gender-neutral teacher may be undermined

by the sheer incongruence between the feminist classroom and the world

that the students see around them.26

Despite the many obstacles to progress, socialization theorists believe

that incremental improvements eventually will lead to a more equitable

society. Although the actual results of efforts at equal treatment often seem

disappointing, socialization feminists point out that we have centuries’

worth of sexist socialization to overcome. In addition, the absence of role

models and mentors owed to a legacy of sexism and racism continues to

force many female students to struggle on their own while their male counterparts

enjoy the support of male faculty.27 Some gender-neutral theorists

also blame other feminists for holding back progress through misguided

attempts to give girls a separate but equal education. For example, Myra

Sadker and David Sadker find Carol Gilligan’s emphasis on gender difference

troubling. In the Sadkers’ view, the feminine characteristics celebrated

in the difference literature are tokens of powerlessness that can and

should be “altered by education.”28 Like other socialization theorists, the

Sadkers have remained hopeful that sustained and vigilant efforts to give

girls the same education as boys will “transform our educational institutions

into the most powerful levers for equity, where girls are valued as

much as boys, . . . and tomorrow’s women are prepared to be full partners

in all activities.”29

Gender Difference Theory

Whereas socialization theorists construe girls’ differences from boys as

a problem—something to be eliminated—gender difference theorists

CARING IN CONTEXT 15

believe that female/feminine traits should be recognized and celebrated.30

Rather than socialize girls to be more like boys, difference theorists seek

to revalorize the relational characteristics associated with girls. As they see

it, the educational problem for girls is the lack of fit between school culture

and feminine culture: relational values are jeopardized by the public

sphere’s commitment to rationalism, competition, conquest, consumerism,

and radical individualism.31 Because caring theorists consider

relational knowledge to be both crucial in its own right and central to girls’

health and well-being, they are concerned to make schools a place where

girls can recognize their own ways of making sense of the world. What girls

need, they argue, is not gender-neutral but “gender-sensitive” education

attuned to the private-sphere values that, after the elementary years,

schools usually leave behind.32

Gender difference theorists disagree, however, as to what gendersensitive

education entails. Some difference theorists argue for parallel

approaches to gendered education. On this view, “women’s ways of

knowing” are neither inferior nor superior to men’s ways of knowing.33

Often, men’s and women’s approaches to the construction of knowledge

are simply different ways of arriving at the same outcome.34 In the masculinist

tradition, for example, skeptical reasoning helps to ensure that

inquiry does not start and end with one’s own assumptions; the same goal,

however, may be served by an inclusive and relational “feminine” orientation

that takes other people’s interests, commitments, and points of view

seriously. Since the two approaches have equal merit, both learning styles

should be enlisted in the classroom.

For other difference theorists, including Gilligan and her colleagues,

the central issue is not so much girls’ learning styles as their belief in themselves

and in the knowledge they construct. What is at issue, from this point

of view, is the conflict between girls’ authentic relational orientation and

the conventionally feminine expectations imposed upon them. When girls

learn that, in order to be valued, they must repress any anger, disagreement,

or disapproval they might feel, they begin to lose confidence in their

felt responses to relationships. Their own sense of their experience doesn’t

matter, girls come to realize: they have to be nice. As these theorists see it,

the problem facing girls is less a curricular than an interpersonal matter.

To restore girls’ sense of themselves as epistemic agents—as people able

to know things for themselves—girls need women role models who will

hear and acknowledge them.35

Still other analyses suggest that boys, no less than girls, need what a

caring orientation has to teach them.36 Nel Noddings, for example, believes

that all schooling must involve “our passions, attitudes, connections, concerns,

and experienced responsibilities” if it is to take up experience in a

meaningful way.37 Like Jane Roland Martin, Noddings has moved away

from seeing educational caring strictly as a matter of providing girls with

what they need and now sees the caring curriculum as a response to the

needs of society at large. If children of either sex are to grow up with a

sense of themselves in relationship, Noddings and Martin argue, then the

traditional curriculum’s emphasis on objective, abstract knowledge must

be scrapped in favor of an emphasis on the so-called feminine (but in their

view also universal) concerns that are indispensable to society’s well-being.

In place of the reason-based, disciplinary curriculum, schools should be

organized around “centers of caring” that integrate “body, mind, and

spirit.”38

Gender difference theorists thus disagree as to whether schools should

endorse conventionally feminine values in the schools. Some difference

theorists argue that it is harmful to hold girls accountable to cultural norms

of selfless femininity, others that girls’ distinctive ways of knowing need to

be acknowledged and affirmed, and still others that democratic education

requires imbuing the curriculum as a whole with the ideals associated with

domesticity. Difference theorists are united, however, in rejecting the

argument that successful schooling for girls should be modeled on what

has worked for boys. Instead of embracing masculine values as universals,

say difference feminists, schools need to acknowledge that the relational

values associated with women are at least as important as the rationalistic

values associated with men.

Structural Theory

Structural analyses focus on the systematic consolidation of power and

privilege in the hands of a minority. According to such theories, power is

something one group exercises over another; it is a kind of possession or

property legitimated by laws, standards, hegemonic practices, and institutional

relations. Both gendered and other forms of inequity are organized

and sustained by more or less stable (albeit flexible) power arrangements.40

In many Western countries, for example, heterosexual unions are materially

privileged over gay and lesbian unions in terms of insurance coverage

for partners, adoption and fostering policies, the right to marriage, and

representation in anti-discrimination laws. Other structural forms of

inequity include the concentration of women in low-paying and/or less

prestigious jobs (as hotel maids and waitresses, for example, or in pinkcollar

jobs such as teacher, secretary, or nurse); hiring and promotion practices

that favor men; medical research that assumes maleness as normative

(as in heart disease and AIDS research); and policies or systems of law

that hold women responsible for pregnancy but deny them the right to

abortion.

Structural inequity also may characterize systems of knowledge. Socialization

and structural theorists alike argue that marginalized groups have

been underrepresented in canonical history, literature, science, and art

because they have been denied access to education and positions of leadership.

To enhance the status of medicine, for example, white men in the

United States barred women (including established midwives) from gaining

institutional access to “real” medical knowledge; later, for similar reasons,

white women barred African-American women from their nursing colleges.

41 More important from a structural perspective, though, are the

exclusions built into the very definitions of legitimate knowledge. Because

mainstream history focuses on military and political leaders, celebrated

artists, and other individuals in the public eye, work associated with the

private sphere, with servants or slaves, or with groups usually does not count

as the kind of achievement documented as “history.” Disciplinary standards

thus prevent us from seeing most people of color, most white women, and

most members of the working class as having made significant contributions

to politics, knowledge, or art. If the definitions do not serve to exclude these

groups in advance, they may be revised to exclude them retroactively, for if

a domain loses its exclusivity, it loses much of its prestige.42

Because we have learned to view gender/sex, race, and class patterns of

exclusion as natural and appropriate, they are difficult to recognize. Their

exclusionary character becomes apparent only through careful, systematic

study guided by theories that enable us to question the adequacy of commonsense

explanations. From most structural perspectives, we have to

understand oppression before we can attempt to alter it; the primary forms

that structural feminist educational intervention takes, therefore, are a liberationist

pedagogy and a counterhegemonic curriculum, both intended

to provide students with critical leverage on their own and others’ situations.

43 Some structural feminists explicitly challenge the ideology that

frames existing power relations as natural or meritocratic; others concentrate

on exploring alternative frameworks.

Explicit structural analyses document the oppression of particular social

groups and demonstrate how that oppression has served the interests of

18 AUDREY THOMPSON

those in power. Often working in materialist disciplines such as history,

sociology, economics, or political theory, feminists who mount explicit

structural analyses call attention to objective patterns of gender inequity.

Problematizing the explanatory power of meritocratic and essentialized

standards connected to the dominant ideology, they show how, when

subordinated groups outperform the dominant group, the standards are

revised. Thus, when women score higher than men on tests or earn more

academic honors, constraints may be adopted to limit women’s access to

education and the legitimacy of the tests or pedagogy in question may be

challenged.44 If, on the other hand, society benefits from a change in the

status of women, the ideology will shift to encompass the change. The idea

that woman’s natural place is in the home, for example, is a historically

and culturally specific notion—one that is easily jettisoned when there is a

shortage of workers.45 In the case of women of color, it has never applied

at all. By exposing students to critical theories and tools, explicitly structural

educational interventions enable students to analyze gender, sex,

race, and class patterns in light of the interests they serve.

Rather than critique the dominant ideology directly, other structural

approaches develop countercultural (implicitly critical) frameworks of

meaning. Women’s studies programs, for example, usually are not meant

to correct mainstream knowledge. Instead, they immerse students in womencentered

texts and analyses that provide them with a richly developed alternative

perspective on mainstream power relations.46 Immersion

approaches allow students to set aside the ideological tools that maintain

the dominant order and work toward understanding women’s different

situations by means of tools and texts generated from women’s own

experience.47

Insofar as students form an acquaintance with outside perspectives and

alternative theories—which might include Marxist feminist, womanist,

radical feminist, critical race theorist, or Chicana feminist theories, among

others—they gain tools that they can use to demystify and challenge prevailing

power relations. They can then examine the contradictions in their

own experience and confront the falsifying relation that the dominant

ideology bears to actual experience. Since it is through alternative and/or

critical analyses, texts, and syllabi that students gain an awareness of the

distorting power of the dominant ideology, texts and theories carry the

burden of critique in structural feminist approaches to education.

Deconstructive Theory

Whereas structural analyses regard the interests served by particular power

structures as more or less constant (so that it makes sense to refer to patriarchy,

whiteness, or the bourgeoisie as coherent categories), deconstructive

analyses treat fixed categories with suspicion. Gender, on this account,

is not to be confused with anything “real.” Rather than referring to a natural

fact, “gender” designates a category. “A politically pragmatic alternative to

the biologically determinist category of ‘sex,’ ” the term gender “emphasiz[

es] the socially constructed and hence alterable character of difference.”

48 Although we have come to view it as natural, gender as we

understand it is a social construction.49 Such naturalized, commonsense

categories are readily turned to exclusionary purposes. Policies devoted

to advancing the cause of “gender equity,” for example, appear

straight/forward and unobjectionable from many feminist perspectives.

But because such policies fuse gender with straightness, they “make particular

identity-classifications a prerequisite to ‘equity’,” thereby “function[

ing] to deny rights more than to affirm them.”50 A key project of

deconstructive theories is to denormalize and denaturalize commonsense

categories, exposing them as socially constructed and maintained.

In undercutting the givenness of received categories, deconstructive

approaches tend to emphasize “interrupting” over critiquing power relations.

51 Since our habits and expectations organize what and how we see,

interruptions create a momentary—admittedly fragile—space for the

development of new possibilities of perception. To disrupt takenfor-

granted narratives about sexuality, gender, race. and class, deconstructive

theorists use a variety of strategies. They may rename the known to

defamiliarize it; invert the expected order of things; import shocking

metaphors into respectable discourses; reread the familiar through a seemingly

inappropriate lens; fold a text back on itself; or “graft” new meaning

onto old words.52 Other strategies include exploiting ambiguity (as in the

use of slashes or parentheses in the middle of words to suggest multiple

possible meanings) and constructing “patchwork” narratives that refuse

artificial coherence by according equal treatment to “conflicting reactions.”

53 Some deconstructive theorists attend to the unsaid or the nearly

absent, as when Toni Morrison points to the shadowy use of blacks and

blackness in literature to define whiteness.54 Others, such as Eve Sedgwick,

focus on discursive sleights of hand, as in the ritual use of a “woman

interest” to deflect attention away from the homosocial relation between

the male protagonists.55 Informed variously by poststructural and other

postmodern theories (including performance, postcolonial, and queer

theories), cultural studies, whiteness studies, and feminist psychoanalytic

theories, such strategies help students to see apparently unconstructed or

spontaneous experience as a cultural text to be deconstructed. Rather than

accepting meanings readymade, students learn to make provisional and

provocative multiple meanings, reworking the materials of perception to

generate new possible perceptions.

Like structural (and, to some extent, socialization) approaches, deconstructive

educational interventions rely heavily on alternative texts and

interpretive practices. Deconstructive classroom practices differ from structural

and socialization approaches, however, in problematizing appeals to

20 AUDREY THOMPSON

equity, fairness, and other overarching categories of value. Deconstructive

theories also challenge the quasi-essentialist appeals to caring and femininity

found in gender difference approaches. Whereas the latter redefine

education as a relational enterprise in which feminine/female responsiveness,

caring, and women’s intuitive knowledge are given central value,

deconstructive theories underscore the need to deconstruct assumptions

about gender and authenticity—along with the categorical claims that difference

theorists make on behalf of intuitive knowledge and caring.56

The four approaches to educational intervention outlined above do not

exhaust all possible feminist approaches, but they do represent the major

frameworks within which most of feminist pedagogy has operated.57 Having

described the main strategies employed in these four different pedagogical

approaches, I now turn to their theoretical underpinnings, for it is only

through an understanding of their theoretical commitments that the challenges

socialization, structural, and deconstructive feminists raise to

gender difference theories can be understood.