1st Edition

Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl A New Materialist Perspective on Gender Inequity in Schools

By Melissa Wolfe Copyright 2022
    162 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    162 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, this book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. The text ultimately illustrates how gender and race inequity is reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential.

    Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl maps affective accounts of students’ everyday experiences in school spaces. Student negotiations with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection are explored to illustrate how inequities are systematically reproduced. Chapters also offer an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male space. Engaging theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, the text highlights filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project, and calls for alternative educational encounters which affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking.

    This text will benefit postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory and feminist theory, as well as educational policy and politics more broadly will also benefit from this book.

    1: Feeling-Thinking-Making More Equitable Lives through Education

    2: Affective Pedagogical Intra-Action Making Inequity: An Apparatus

    3: Affect: Feeling-Thinking-Making Belonging at School through Joy and Shame

    4: Dis/Comforting Schoolgirl Figurations of Belonging

    5: Dis/Comforting Subject-Choice: Agency, Anxiety, Affordance

    6: Enabling Constraints for Angel-in-the-Making

    7: Feeling-Thinking-Making Gendered and Raced School Spaces: The Materials Engineering Classroom and Basketball Court

    8: Feeling-Thinking-Making - Joy

    Biography

    Melissa Joy Wolfe is Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education at Monash University, Australia