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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]

While there has always been a profound indifference to the affective domain in formal education, given its Cartesian allegiance to the development of the rational autonomous subject, this indifference to the emotional subject is intensifying with the glorification of performativity. As higher education is especially subject to performance measurement and rankings, this study of top-level management in Irish higher education shows that those who hold senior management posts are subjected increasingly to disciplinary rationalities that largely preclude being a primary carer. The definition of senior managerial posts as care-less positions, in terms of primary care responsibilities, advantages those who are care-free and these are disproportionately men in societies where the moral imperative to do primary care work applies mainly to women. The data suggest that understanding how the care ceiling operates is crucial for understanding why women do not occupy senior managerial positions within new managerial regimes in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]