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In this study, we argue that touch is a way of producing gender in preschool and our aim is to explore different kinds of matters that intersect with gendered touch practices in this context. Our theoretical starting points draw on the performativity of gender and the discursively constructed touch practices of early childhood educators. We analyse these discourses by employing intersectional analysis. The data consist of three group discussions among 27 female early childhood educators. The findings suggest that gendered touch practices intersect across children's age, materiality, time, place, and heteronormative assumptions. Furthermore, cultural conventions affect the ways in which children are touched and the kinds of touch that are considered appropriate in relation to gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This inquiry into the nature of feminist solidarity in the academic sciences is guided by the intra-activity of gendered bodies in teaching-intensive faculty positions. It uses diffractive methodology to examine how response-able research practice can account for enactment of social discourse through agential cuts. Over the course of a two-year ethnography in a university with high research activity, gender performativity in the contested space of feminized teaching and masculine science was analysed. This article aims to make visible how researcher subjectivities entangle with data collection. Results show how specific agential cuts – alpha female, silencing, less-than-person, squashing passion, and staying to get tenure – illuminate a unique diffractive pattern. The pattern troubles structural notions of feminist solidarity, as ethnographic participants marginalized by institutional hierarchies survive by queering it. Furthermore, the inquiry gestures towards a humble, local, and tentative contribution to post-human theorizing on 'queering the glass ceiling'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As researchers working within a neoliberalist academic regime propagated by discourses of responsibilisation, risk and prudentialism, we experienced a dilemma about whether to publicly present views expressed by research participants that critiqued the policy position of the government department that funded the research. Our dilemma was exacerbated because research funding is relatively difficult to attain for women academics. However, in recognising that rural women's voices are often marginalised in rural policy formation, and to maintain our ethical responsibility to these participants, in this article we share these potentially contentious research findings and in doing so problematise neoliberal strictures that can erode individual researcher autonomy and that of universities as independent agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad's theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the possibilities for girls' academic subjectivities. Using a diffractive methodology, we highlight the mutually arising agencies of bodies, hoodies, schools, grades, and media constructions of multi-talented 'supergirls.' This analysis highlights the importance of an intersectional approach to academic success alongside an understanding that inequalities, such as sexism, still endure for smart girls. We conclude by emphasizing the power of materiality in girls' everyday lives to shift understandings of self, school, and smartness, as well as the importance of moving beyond dichotomous and decontextualized accounts of girls' high achievement that have circulated for over twenty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings into conversation theories of performance and performativity to argue that the analogy of a teacher as a performer is a very complex discourse that both empowers and disempowers women teachers. As the field of teachers is increasingly comprised of women and the education policy and administrative leadership fields is increasingly comprised of men, there is an equally disturbing increase in the amount of disciplining, standardisation, and evaluation of teachers’ practices within schools in recent decades. The author argues that the perceived feminisation of the teaching field produces a situation in which teachers’ performance is threatening to the patriarchal institutions, causing further surveillance upon women and their role. Yet, in contrast, an analogy of performance also can allow teachers to subvert hegemonic patriarchal practices. Central to this discussion are notions of threat, corporeality, and temporality. The author concludes with examples of how teachers and researchers have successfully subverted and re-appropriated the teaching as performance analogy for the betterment of teachers, despite the complexity of this discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper brings together themes from the varied texts of Gilles Deleuze in outlining a Deleuzo-feminist ethics that speaks to contemporary debates in education. Drawing on Deleuze's (1988) engagement with Spinozan ethics, Foucault's (1987) ‘practice of freedom’, the Nietzschean ‘doctrine of judgment’ and ‘system of cruelty’ (Deleuze 2001), and Bergsonian ‘fabulatory processes’ (Deleuze 1995), we explore the poststructuralist distinction between ethics and morality and its implications for feminist responses to neoliberal educational practices, identities and cultures. Following Gannon (2012a, 2012b) and others (e.g. Braidotti 1996, 2000; Colebrook 2000; Grosz 2000, 2002; Wyatt and Davies 2011), we mobilise Deleuzian accounts of subjectivity, corporeality and difference in reconfiguring the existential dimension of teaching as an ethico-aesthetic relationality. A Deleuzo-feminist ethics of empowerment promises: escape from systems of cruelty that mark, shame and blame; the politicisation of such systems; productive experimental alliances and an alternative mode of existence to that prescribed for the teaching and student body by neoliberal rationalisation and bureaucratic proceduralism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]