Feminism is a concept and a practice. As a concept feminism is polysemic, semantically contested, networked, interactive, powerful and dynamic. An important binary that has had real effects in the space of learning – the area of life that is fully focused on learning – is the male/female binary, an oppositional coupling of two words, and this implies a relationship between these two descriptive terms, both of which can be problematised. In addition, the strength, type and probative force of this relationship is central to its meaning.
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 epistemic differences are constructed to conceptualise masculinity and femininity, how these key categories function to define the nature of people (women, men and intersex persons), and how they work to attach different valuations to women’s, intersex persons’ and men’s dispositions and capacities.
Any claim to knowledge made by us or anyone else is framed or enframed; and consequently there is a need to articulate and give expression to this enframing as it relates to ontological, epistemological and methodological concerns, and thus it comprises ineluctably a reasoned argument to support it. This requires a theory of mind and therefore a theory of the relationship between mind or minds and the world. In addition, concepts, such as feminism, can be polysemic and used in a number of different ways and are enframed in a form of life, where this is understood discursively, materially, socially, politically or epistemically.
Our framework is a form of dispositional realism. All this and more needs to be established before the central argument of the book we have just published (Women Curriculum Theorists: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity [Leaton Gray & Scott, 2023]) can be attended to.
