Medical fetishism in education: gendering the ‘clinical’ metaphor

Abstract

Teaching is increasingly called upon to become a clinical practice profession, like medicine. The term ‘clinical’ is used in a common-sense way to describe idealized teaching practice, as if universally understood to be a superior and desirable way to enact professionalism. Yet there is little in the literature that mounts a feminist critique of the cultural politics put to work through the word ‘clinical’ in education. We ask what it reifies and how it operates to firm up inequalities and binaries, especially in relation to the gendered concept of ‘mastery’, the unquestioning adoption of epidemiological-style evidence-based practice and the worship of masculinist data cults. We call for further work to explore how teachers both take up and resist the clinical label.