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