This paper will provide a review of a collection of essays edited by Becky Ropers-Huilman entitled Gendered Futures in Higher Education. Critical Perspectives for Change. The book was published by the State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y., in 2003. The paper will consider how this collection of essays contributes (or not) to this ongoing deconstructive, counter-hegemonic practice, necessary to disrupt the sex/gender system and to, as Stuart Hall maintains examine “concepts and ideas in a signifying field…meaning is relational, it can never be fixed and is subject to redefinition and reappropriation.” (Hall in Lecture notes) The way that the book is organized, revealing debates within higher education concerning how to address the problem of gender inequalities, which many of the articles in different ways suggest remains very invisible despite feminist inroads into the academy, will be a point of analysis. The mixture of often competing viewpoints may in fact provide a kind of working text where debates are shown to be played out, pointing in its structuring itself to the needs as well as the collisions of positions and identity within academia in relation to class, gender, race, intersections.
[...] Thus this volume of essays is valuable to read in that it negotiates the problems that it also elucidates it points out gaps in research, inside the academic research paper and shows us examples, more or less useful within its pages, so that one can deconstruct the book itself to examine the situation of the academy today, in the area of higher education, the intersections of gender, race, class. This makes certain articles within the entire more limited on their own, but useful in context to one another, pointing out gaps and elisions and helping us focus on the internal problems of defining terms and the problems of essentialism that potentially can emerge in all formulas that involve categorizing or universalizing of position. [...]
[...] As Adela Garcia Aracil (2008) notes in Europe (but this can apply to North America just as easily) there is still a gap between the number of men who graduate from universities and who are in the labour force, and, as well, earn higher wages. The wage gap exists in all fields, even those where men and women may have in recent decades achieved more parity in terms of percentages hired. In the areas of math and other sciences, law and engineering, the professions are still predominantly male, and there are many mechanisms of exclusion including internal harassment, of subtle and not so subtle forms, that revolve around masculine aggression. [...]
[...] The problem of fragmentation, difference, diversity and speaking on behalf of others, therefore, can be seen to be drawn attention to; sets of problems embedded in the higher educational institution, at least the institution where these papers were produced, a way to look at problems in the gender debates in higher education institutions in America, perhaps generally. Thus, critique of this volume, and individual essays within it, is not meant to be judgmental or dismissive, but rather a way or space within which to open up and examine the various narratives through which we negotiate and contest meaning, even at the margins. [...]
[...] This book is very valuable therefore because it interrogates a number of areas which are also notably present in much feminist research on gender socialization and role maintenance within and outside of educational institutions. As the book's separate articles maintain, collectively, women need to negotiate change from their position of marginality in society, a marginalization that begins in childhood, accompanies girls through their experience of school from the outset, and continues to assert gendered constructions throughout their lives. However, as the book also makes evident gender and race and class cannot be looked at separately, and a discussion of race can prove to encode invisibility with regard to gender issues. [...]
[...] we can work to understand the ways in which gendered norms and expectations have a variety of effects on teaching, learning, and leading in higher education.” (Ropers-Huilman: The reason for concentrating on what happens in higher educational institutions is that “Higher education has far-reaching consequences for the construction of our society higher education both reinforces and resists society's norms, what we do in these teaching and learning environments have the potential to exacerbate, replicate, or challenge gender constructions that exist in society writ large.” (Ropers-Huilman: Education is crucial to the dissemination of information and the constructing of alternative world-views, views which through the power of the university as an institution of respected learning, can elicit wide ranging, sweeping changes in society, at least in theory. [...]
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