National gender equity and schooling policy in Australia : struggles for a non-identitarian feminist politics

• Published in: Australian educational researcher Vol. 36; no. 2; pp. 21 - 37
• Main Author: Keddie, Amanda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-08-2009; Springer Nature B.V; Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
• Subjects: Activism; Australia; Criticism; Education; Educational Change; Educational history; Educational Policy; Educational Policy and Politics; Educational Psychology; Equal Education; Females; Feminism; Foreign Countries; Gender equity; Institutional Autonomy; Males; Politics; Politics of education; Self Management; Sex Fairness; Teaching and Teacher Education; Vocational Education; Australia; Gender Equity; Australian School; Feminist Politics; Schooling Reform; Australian Educational Researcher
• ISSN: 0311-6999; 2210-5328
• DOI: 10.1007/BF03216897

This article tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from the National Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987, to current policy concerns with boys' educational underperformance. The article's key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of economic rationalism and anti-feminist discourses. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's understandings of distributive and cultural gender justice and her notion of a nonidentitarian feminist politics, the article critically examines the ways in which such imperatives have re-articulated equity and schooling concerns. Through these lenses, the limitations of the affirmative gender binary politics and remedies that have dominated gender and schooling reform in Australia are highlighted. The article concludes with an illumination of the gender justice spaces currently being mobilised in Australian schools. Such spaces, it is argued, fostered within a context of increasing autonomy and self-management for schools, are providing avenues for creative and disruptive (pro)feminist activism. [Author abstract]