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Feminism and neo/liberalism: contesting education’s possibilities

journal contribution
posted on 2019-01-01, 00:00 authored by Jillian BlackmoreJillian Blackmore
Feminist theorists critiqued classical liberalism for the gender binaries embedded in social, political and economic theory and everyday social relations. Neoliberalism economises the social and political based on autonomous individualism, equating equity with choice, naturalising the market as the mechanism to allocate social goods and education while disregarding constraining discursive and material contexts. Neoliberalism also co-opts the feminist desire for agency through notions of choice. The paper tracks the historical conditions in Anglophile states that nurtured neoliberalism’s uptake with its focus on human capital theory, rethinking the dominant educational discourse of twenty-first-century skills using Yeatman’s democratic framing of social liberalism and Nussbaum’s capability approach. Feminists argue for a just and civil democratic society that dissolves binary thinking and focuses on relationality, rights and responsibility.

History

Journal

Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education

Volume

40

Pagination

176-190

Location

Abingdon, Eng.

ISSN

0159-6306

eISSN

1469-3739

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2019, Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Issue

2

Publisher

Taylor & Francis