Disciplining academic women: gender restructuring and the labour of research in Australian universities

This chapter examines the ‘gendered nature of the social organisation of research and scientific knowledge production’ and in particular the gendered nature of the corporatisation of higher education (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 9). It argues that the conditions of labour of the entrepreneurial university and underlying market- oriented instrumentalism has changed the nature of the relationship of higher education with the public, with the individual student and the academic, in ways that are gendered. ‘Markets do not make social distinctions disappear, they regulate interaction between institutions e.g. families and education, and “instrumentalist” status distinctions, bending pre-existing cultural value to capitalist purposes’ (Fraser and Honneth 1998, 58). The dominant neoliberal policy ‘doxa’, with its economistic view of higher education in relation to the knowledge economy, is an ideology which shapes a range of constantly changing discursive and material practices (Epstein et al. 2008). This is ‘not so much a “new” form of liberal government, but rather a hybrid or intensified form of it’ that works through and on subjectivities that are racialised, gendered, classed and sexualised (Bansel et al. 2008, 673).