At David’s retirement party, after all the toasts and speeches, we started discussing something that represents a still accumulating problem in the field of curriculum studies: how is it that so many of the seminal works relating to curriculum theory focus exclusively on the contributions of men, given that there are many such female theorists (and professional educators are more likely to be women)? To that end, recently we have been giving a great deal of thought to different formations and interpretations of feminism, as a way of gaining new insights into the field.
This has been challenging, as feminism is something that can be regarded as both a concept and a practice. As a concept, feminism is complex, powerful, and dynamic, with aspects that rub up against various forms of contemporary identity in difficult, and sometimes uncomfortable ways, particularly when we are talking about intersectionality. As a practice, like Schrödinger’s cat, feminism is present and not present in educational life at the same time – we use language that signals equality, but the presence of women in leadership and management is still lacking in some quarters. In this way, feminism is certainly an ongoing project of democratic voice and engagement.
Although women have been actively involved throughout the centuries in making societies, they have been marginalised when it comes to the production of knowledge about societies and social activities. This has implications for how we conceptualise masculinity and femininity, and how these key categories function to define the nature of people’s contributions, as well as defining who people really are (which may not necessarily be neatly classified as male or female). In other words, it is a question of who is allowed to determine the construction and boundaries of knowledge, and what the related consequences of that might be. The book we have just published, Women Curriculum Theorists: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity (Routledge, 2023) attempts to interrogate that very question.
