The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research

Christina Gowlett, Mary Lou Rasmussen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317326687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research represents the editors' intention to disrupt cycles of thinking about the place of queer theory in educational research. The book aims to encourage dialogue about the objects and subjects of queer research, the forms of politics incited by the use of queer theory in education, and the methodological approaches used by scholars when queer(y)ing.

The contributions to this book come from those who find queer theory problematic, as well as from those who continue to see a productive place for queer research in education, however that may be defined. The editors have collected contributions that attend to the boundaries that are placed around queer research in education by researchers themselves, and by peers, ethics committees, funding bodies and university and government bureaucracies. Considering how key researchers in gender and education identify with, or deliberately distance themselves from, queer theory, this collection grapples with the contemporary cultural politics of doing queer theoretical work in different education spaces and places. In short, it seeks to disrupt what people think they already know about the 'place' of queer theory in education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Interview with Raewyn Connell: the cultural politics of queer theory in education research

Mary Lou Rasmussen^a, Christina Gowlett^b and Raewyn Connell^c

^aFaculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia; ^bSchool of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ^cUniversity of Sydney, Australia

Mary Lou Rasmussen (MLR) & Christina Gowlett (CG): Raewyn, can you talk about your key influences in theorising gender as a concept?

Raewyn Connell (RC): Well, firstly the women’s movement of the 1970s, and secondly the women’s movement of the 1970s, and thirdly, the women’s movement of the 1970s. That was the context in which I began to work intellectually on gender issues. Because I was living as a man I wasn’t actually part of the mobilisation. I think the first Women’s Liberation movement meeting in Sydney was just at the end of 1969. And then – When was the first issue of Refractory Girl?¹

I was certainly involved in thinking and writing about gender difference by 1974. I think it was that year that Madge Dawson – ²

MLR & CG: A great name.

RC: Yes; she’s mostly forgotten now, but she was a wonderful person – Madge got control of a session at the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, a big multidisciplinary science congress. She organised a session on ‘Australian families’, which turned into a special issue of the ANZAAS journal Search, with the new feminism strongly represented. It included Anne Summers, Julie Rigg, Gill Bottomley, Lois Bryson, Bettina Cass, Dennis Altman and more (Dawson, 1974). That special issue was one of the first sustained attempts at gender analysis that got published in Australia. It included my first publication on gender – a naive number-crunching piece on sex differences among teenagers, called, believe it or not, ‘You Can’t Tell Them Apart Nowadays, Can You?’ [Laughter] (Connell, 1974)

MLR & CG: You talk about ‘1970s feminism’. That’s clearly had a profound effect on you, the whole way through your career.

RC: Yes, sure.

MLR & CG: Can you talk about specific ideas or readings that really resonated for you, and continue to be readings that you are referencing, when you are thinking about gender?

RC: Let me start with the talking rather than the reading. There was a lot of debate going on. It crystallised into text at moments like that workshop on the Australian family, or in the foundation of Refractory Girl.

MLR & CG: So they were key moments?

RC: Well, they were crystallising moments. A social movement goes on continuously. And there is humour, the laughter and the songs. Some of the good early Women’s Liberation stuff was about singing. And there are very funny feminist songs from the 1970s, I think I’ve still got one of the songbooks.

MLR & CG: One was the guitarist – Judy Small.

RC: Oh, yes, yes, wonderful stuff, and I am sure I’ve still got some of her tapes. So that was a social movement and things were crackling all over. That’s a dimension of queer politics that I recognise and admire.

The Women’s Liberation movement was a context for thinking, beyond specific texts. Well, there were specific texts too. The one that probably had most impact on me was Juliet Mitchell’s (1971) Woman’s Estate, which itself was an elaboration of a paper that she published in 1966, amazingly, a New Left Review piece called ‘Women, the Longest Revolution’. There were pamphlets that circulated about wages for housework, about date rape, gender-based violence – that wasn’t the term used at the time – about questions of organisation, about whether you needed formal organisation at all. I’ve still got a stack of those pamphlets, which were probably more influential at the time than books. But there were also books like Sisterhood is Powerful (Morgan, 1970) from the United States.

MLR & CG: A big part of that era as well was lesbian separatism and ideas like women-only spaces. That was part of the social movement in that period as well, wasn’t it? Like the creation of the Women’s Library in Sydney.

RC: And there was a Union side of it and a Peace Movement side of it, which were very powerful. There were equal pay campaigns, equal rights for women in the workplace, promotion rights and so forth, all through this period. They were as important as the cultural side of it, but now not so well remembered.

All this is trying to answer your question about what shaped my thinking about gender. It was certainly the recognition of gender as a power structure. It’s not natural difference that’s at stake – it’s power and inequality, oppression and violence, exploitation. That meant gender had some resemblance to what the New Left had been analysing in its power structure research through the 1960s, a literature I knew well. There were many attempts to develop a Women’s Liberation theory parallel to – not exactly Marxism, but a simplified class analysis. That stuff really hasn’t survived, because it was pretty rough and ready.

The feminism that got early into universities and mass media had a soft social theory of gender, a version of sex role theory basically. Sex role theory already existed in sociology and psychology: Mirra Komarovsky and Talcott Parsons were two of the best-known American sex role theorists. In the 1960s, most of that was quite conservative. The idea was that having reciprocal sex roles made for social stability and personal integration.

Women’s Liberation stood that on its head and said, ‘Okay, yes, we’ve got sex roles – and we don’t want them!’ A lot of Women’s Liberation work analysed how there were stereotyped versions of women in the media, and roles enforced through schools and in the family. The critique of the family was central to Women’s Liberation at that moment – the family seen as the site of women’s oppression. Seeing the family as a major site of social inequality and oppression was a really radical move, and destabilised a whole lot of thinking in education, in relation to media

MLR & CG: Some of that stuff has been lost as well, I think.

RC: I think so. But within 10 years you had feminist ‘friends of the family’ seeing ways that families actually provided protection. Black feminists in the US and Aboriginal women in Australia were saying ‘Actually the family is really important to us’, and therefore criticising white feminism. On top of that is the issue of Gay marriage today.

MLR & CG: It’s a thing about forgetting that politics, which is that point you are making, isn’t it, Raewyn?

RC: Yes. I don’t want to make it sound mild. It was a revolutionary politics. You wanted to overthrow the State – the State was the centre of patriarchal power. There were many attempts not just to build an analysis of patriarchy parallel to an analysis of capitalism, but to show that they were somehow the same thing. Juliet Mitchell (1975) in Psychoanalysis and Feminism saw patriarchy as the ideological moment, and capitalism the political economy, working in a single structure. Some of the American stuff, the ‘dual systems’ theories of the 1970s (seeing capitalism and patriarchy as two interlocking systems of power), was also interesting. But none of that was completely convincing.

As you were saying, lesbian separatism was emerging in the mid-1970s. This developed an inverted gender essentialism. The work of Mary Daly became hugely popular; and that was exceptionally hostile to transwomen, really very nasty – that’s where Janice Raymond came from, in the book that was regrettably the most influential feminist text on transsexuality. I’ve talked about this in the Signs paper (Connell, 2012) – ‘Transsexual women and feminist thought’.

So there were currents that were very hard for me to handle. But from early on, I was convinced that the basic thrust of Women’s Liberation analysis was right. Gender is a massive structure of social oppression and inequality. Anyone who has a commitment to social justice – or to human survival – must try to change it.

MLR & CG: You’ve talked about your interlocutors from the 1970s. Can you talk a little more about how that’s evolved? Just take us through maybe the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s a bit. [Laughter]

RC: Yes, sure. There have constantly been things I’ve been arguing against. I have been contesting popular essentialism and pseudoscientific essentialism about gender, for at least 30 years. (One of the most popular posts on my blog this year is a little essay called ‘Feminism’s challenge to biological essentialism’.)

I say ‘pseudoscientific’ because I don’t think real science is essentialist. What is essentialist is the debased pop science that claims men and women have different types of brains, or the ‘What About the Boys?’ stuff that claims, in defiance of the evidence, that boys learn differently from girls. Essentialism has evolved! At one stage it was anatomy, and then it was hormones, and then it was genes, and then it was brains. Basically it was always saying the same thing: that men and women are naturally vastly different and the inequality we see in society is a product of biological determination – there is nothing we can do about it; therefore, feminism is crap. Essentialism says that again and again in different rhetorics. So I am always attempting to deal with that.

On the other hand, I have been contesting sex role theory. This is the popular version of a social understanding of gender; though it is also turned into static and functionalist accounts of gender by social theorists. That goes back to Talcott Parsons and Bronislaw Malinowski, but it comes forward to people like Pierre Bourdieu. I am staggered at the influence that Bourdieu has in sociology generally, and in discourse about men and masculinity more recently – given that his approach is a theory of social reproduction, a static social theory, and ignores almost all feminist writing since the 1970s.

MLR & CG: Can you elaborate on that a little bit, about Bourdieu, and how you think it’s static?

RC: One of his most famous books is called Reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977), and if you analyze his later work you’ll find it always contains a model of social reproduction. That’s what the notion of ‘habitus’ is. Many people take this to be a French variant of a concept of socialisation. It’s actually not that; it’s a functionalist claim about how social structures and identities are reproduced over time. That is the literal definition of ‘habitus’: it’s what enables the reproduction of structure. (This has been evident for a very long time; see my critique ‘The Black Box of Habit on the Wings of History’, 1983.) When Bourdieu (2001) finally came to write about gender explicitly in his book Masculine Domination, what he came up with was an old-fashioned theory of social reproduction and gender dichotomy, which was simply not informed by the tremendous development of research on gender that had occurred – including an international literature on masculinity, and on power in gender relations.

The alternative to functionalism isn’t an abstract notion of fluidity. Rather, it’s a way of thinking about social life that gives a grip on the dynamics of change.

I began teaching about gender issues about 1974/75, and then more explicitly when I was involved in setting up the sociology department at Macquarie University. In the late-1970s and through the 1980s, we developed undergraduate courses on gender and sexuality and a very active research programme. Rosemary Pringle, Ann Game, Michael Gilding, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett were among the people I worked with there. Ann and Rosemary wrote Gender at Work (Game & Pringle, 1983) that came out of a socialist feminist initiative, collecting data about gender inequalities in different industries, putting it together and a really good book came out of it. Michael Gilding (1991) wrote The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family. Sandra, Gary, Dean Ashenden and I did the re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The cultural politics of queer theory in education research
• 1. Interview with Raewyn Connell: the cultural politics of queer theory in education research
• 2. Queer reparations: dialogue and the queer past of schooling
• 3. Horse-girl assemblages: towards a post-human cartography of girls’ desire in an ex-mining valleys community
• 4. Queer worlding childhood
• 5. Crafting the normative subject: queerying the politics of race in the New Zealand Health education classroom
• 6. Queer(y)ing and recrafting agency: moving away from a model of coercion versus escape
• 7. Dissenting with queer theory: reading Rancière queerly
• 8. What can a concept do? Rethinking education’s queer assemblages
• Index