The Cinderella Complex Undone the field positioning of higher education studies and scholars a femin

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• The Cinderella Complex Undone the field
  positioning of higher education studies and
  scholars a feminist reinterpretation
• Professor Valerie Hey
• Centre for Higher Education and Equity
  Research (CHEER)
• University of Sussex, UK
• (v.hey_at_sussex.ac.uk)

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Homo Academicus His Theory ?

• Feminist de/tours amongst the hegemony in the
  field of Higher Education Studies
• Difficult trick is to decline the fixed location
  of the margin in order to speak
  authoritatively.
• To perform a different division of the sensible
  (Ranciere,cited in Dillon, 2005432) )

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Counting The Masters of the HE Universe

• Formal
• Editors of influential HE Journals viz.
• Studies in HE
• Higher Education Policy
• Higher Education, Management Policy
• Higher Education Quarterly
• Plenaries
• Informal voices cited in THES

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The Ignored or Invisible Woman?

• An Extraordinary Gentleman (Editorial in a
  top journal in Higher Education 2007)
• Let me finally address a third quality. (name of
  retiring editor) is an extraordinary gentleman.
  As an editor he treated all those that submitted
  articles to (name of journal) gentlemanlike
  encouraging those that needed support and
  critically approaching those that would be able
  to cope with high-level scholarly criticism. I am
  tempted to pursue the analogue with the leader of
  the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Allan
  Quatermain in the 2003 movie , given the
  Scottish background of the actor playing the role
  of Quatermain, as well as for the actors grey
  beard. And, admitted, there is a danger to take
  the analogue too literally. One may wonder about
  Quatermains illustrious fellow Extraordinary
  Gentlemen who would be the Dr Jekyll (and Mr
  Hyde) of higher education research? One may
  ponder about the identity of the invisible man in
  higher education policy. And who would be the
  Dorian Gray the forever young scholar of higher
  education? Suffice to say, that (name of retiring
  editor) has much in common with Allan Quatermain,
  the main character of Rider Haggard' story of
  King Solomons Mines.

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Male Melancholia ?

• Pessimistic
• Discourse of lack and loss in field of HE
  studies in terms of
• Methodology
• Substantive
• Professional
• Positional

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Male Melancholic Representations of the Field 1

• Within universities, higher education is not a
  highly-regarded subject areaThe RAE is
  responsible for its low status because it tends
  to denigrate the practice-based disciplinesso
  higher education is a bit of a Cinderella within
  a Cinderella
• (Roger Brown, THES January 8th 2009)

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Male Melancholic Representations of the Field 2

• That the school was closed down shows you where
  the fields of education in general, and higher
  education in particular rank in the hierarchy of
  the disciplines typically at the bottom, maybe
  a bit above nursing or library studies
• (Philip Altbach on the closure of the School of
  Education at The University of Chicago THES 8th
  January 2009)

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Male Melancholic Representations of the Field 3

• In my view you folks have a lost generation or
  two. There are giants in the field such as
  Maurice Kogan, Tony Becher, Gareth Williams,
  Oliver Fulton, Mary Henkel, to name a few but
  they are all quite senior. And frankly, you dont
  have a large stock of younger scholars coming up
• (Gary Rhoades Outgoing Head of Centre for the
  Study of HE, University
• of Arizona THES 8th January 2009)

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Melancholic Representations of the Field 4

• Narrowness of the field
• Lack of high-level theoretical studies
• Not theoretically ambitious
• Intellectually parochial
• (Ron Barnett, THES January 8th 2009)

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Feminist (Cheerful Jouissance?

• Skeggs (2008) on feminist sociology and social
  theory
• Optimism, Attrition and contestation
• Powerful knowledge and powerful narratives
• Need performatives as vital languages
• Confident dispersal and congealing too

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An Unstable Field of Higher Education Knowledge

• The Cinderella Amongst Cinderellas
• Does the mournful performative (potentially)
  queer hegemonic masculine academic identity?
• Or is this merely a strong case of positional
  adjustment amongst the dominated amongst the
  dominants
• (Bourdieu, 1996, )

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Feminist Passionate Subjects Passionate
Attachments

• How is it, as academics, that we are able to
  recognize ourselves and be recognized as doing
  work that is of value? Where do the terms of
  recognition come from? They pre-exist us, they
  determine us, and we breathe life into them by
  living and working within their terms. We are
  caught, I would suggest, in a complex ambivalence
  between, on the one hand, taking ourselves up in
  familiar and already recognizable terms, and on
  the other, engaging in work through which the
  terms of recognition themselves might be
  reworked.
• (Bronwyn Davies, 200631 (4) 508)

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Rock and a Hard place? Patrilineal ignorance
and/or misogyny

• The unacknowledged discursive closures and
  foreclosure
• The privileged focus on the public of and as
  policy
• The naturalisation of what is important
  mimesis of others regulative agendas
• Deconstruction or desiring differently?

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On making a different space of desire

• What does feminist theory offer that women
  (might) want?
• Reflexive Resources
• Re-inscription
• Respect
• Recognition

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The Need to deface the field ?

• Reminders of successful example de/facement viz.
  Cultural Studies
• Hall talks of the reconstruction enacted by
  feminism as
• a thief in the night, it broke in,
  interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the
  time, crapped on the table of cultural studies
• (Hall, 1992282)
• We cannot suffer the loss of things we never
  inherited?

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Some Possible Performatives and Some
Performatives of Possibility
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Higher Education Some sociological theoretical
points of departure

• Re-imagining Equity resources from outside a
  narrow Anglo-American Gaze necessarily
  intersectional analysis difference as jigsaw
  not see saw Louise Morley Kattie Lussier and
  colleagues engaged in considering the multiple
  levels of the political and educational as sites
  for the production of in/equity
• Re-imagining Higher Education as an Affective
  Realm with a commitment to thinking in a
  decentred way so as to recentre perhaps in
  different divisions of the sensible for example
  thinking with/in the triplet desire, affects and
  emotion and their various conceptual logics which
  sculpt out what we might mean by consciousness
  and its complexities this insight opens up the
  realm of peoples attachments, investments to
  their own selves and its current formation
  their values, their knowledge not as
  psycho-therapeutic discourse but to consider a
  number of problematics

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Need a Vocabulary of Alternative Aspirations

• Affinities and Staying Put - Counters the
  deficit model local affinities and commitments
  Sarah Evans recent PhD on working class girls
  in London cleverness and communities
• Aspirations are multiple not singular
• HE vocabulary mono-logical effaces the body,
  the (potentialities) of reproduction, caring,
  ageing, the pleasures and pains of bodies
  curricular and routes through HE for bodies are
  daunting

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The Affective - Psycho-social Analytic
Vocabulary Example 1

• Claudia Lappings work offers a productive way
  to think gender as change and continuity
  recognising them as acting at different levels of
  the social practice (i.e. womens increased
  presence in the academy) and their persistent
  psychic subjectification under the law of the
  Symbolic Order - her ethnographic observations in
  HE seminar lecture rooms focus on how
  authority in the academy is done and undone in
  relation to both students and staff. Eclectic mix
  of Lacan, Bourdieu, Bernstein and post-Lacanian
  work e.g.. Laclau and Mouffe and Zizek.
• Speaks to Lois McNays criticism of Bourdieus
  habitus as insufficiently sensitive to the deep
  recesses where gendered (hetero)sexuality is
  re/inscribed and to Bernsteins relentless
  presumptive discourse of mastery directing
  educational research to focus on a problem and
  its vicissitudes as if this could be done
  outside gender.

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Lapping on her own logic

• Psychoanalytically informed feminist theory
  struggles to find a political strategy that
  destabilises gender hierarchies, but that does
  not embrace an impossible outside of language and
  the law (Kristeva, 1986a,b Rose, 1986 Butler,
  1993, 2000). Luce Irigaray and Lois McNay both
  criticise Lacanian approaches as leaving no space
  between language, subjectivity and the social
• Both, in quite different ways, reconceptualise
  the disjunctures between sensuous, bodily
  experience and the symbolic realm as a more
  radical, creative imaginary, offering
  possibilities for a positive reconfiguration of
  gender (Irigaray, 1985, 1993 Whitford, 1991
  McNay, 2000). Kristevas conceptualisation of the
  semiotic is also sometimes presented in this
  way, as a potential strategic space for the
  radical subversion of linguistic structures.

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