Transgressing the Boundaries: Re-Imagining Gender in Education

Abstract

In this paper we attempt to understand how organisational culture and structural conditions that occur simultaneously with the global processes of restructuring education, in which asymmetrical and unequal nature of social relations of gender are reconstructed through discourses of masculinity, rationality and leadership, inform such restructuring. We argue that schools and universities in South Africa are sites for the enacting of gender and that the conceptions of gender shape the provision of state-supported education. We agree with Lengermann & Niebrugge’s (2008:456) assertion that feminist educational thinking views the intersection of education and gender through a variety of lenses (gender difference, gender inequality, gender oppression, and structural oppression). Therefore, feminist educational thinking not only shapes how we think about education but what we do in education as teachers, academics and citizens within the country.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n13p119