Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl: A New Materialist Perspective on Gender Inequity in Schools

This book explores the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, offering a feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. It highlights how gender and race inequity are reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential. It also examines STEM subject fields as entitled male space and calls for alternative educational encounters that affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 154 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, it sheds light on the ways in which schoolgirls are shaped by the prevailing societal expectations and norms. Through a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of school life, including classroom interactions, extracurricular activities, and media representations, the text demonstrates how gender and race inequity are reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential.

Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl delves into the affective accounts of students' everyday experiences in school spaces. It explores the intricate negotiations that students engage in with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection, highlighting how these processes perpetuate inequities. The chapters also provide an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male spaces, shedding light on the ways in which gender biases and stereotypes are reinforced within these fields.

The text engages theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, highlighting the filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project. It calls for alternative educational encounters that affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking. This book will be of great benefit to postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory, feminist theory, educational policy and politics more broadly will also find this book to be insightful and valuable.

Weight: 300g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032073705