Subjectivity and discipline women teachers and contradictory norms of recognition

Abstract

Disciplinary technologies used to manage children in the school have been understood by feminist educational scholars to be intimately related to the subjectivity of the teacher. While inspired by the theories of Michel Foucault, a number of feminists have built on his ideas in light of advances in understandings of gender, power, social regulation, and psychoanalysis (Butler, 1997; Hekman, 1996; McCallum, 1996; Sawicki, 1996). More specifically, gendered subjectivities are never complete, and the body, which is acted upon in power-knowledge relations, has a psychic interiority that is not addressed Foucault's work. In this chapter, we argue that to understand the subjectification of the female teacher in terms of the disciplinarian of physical force and the discipline of the loving, nurturing, childcentred pedagogue, it is therefore important to understand disciplinary technologies, including corporal punishment and the child-centred pedagogies of public education systems, as not only potentially gendered, but also in terms of what Hollway and Jefferson (2000) refer to as the psycho-social subject.