Feminist philosophies and academic women's teaching: interviews and events in a foreign country. A paper presented to the National Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Hobart. November 1995 Jeanette Rhedding-Jones School of Language, Culture and Arts Faculty of Education Deakin University Warrnambool 3280 Vic. Research Descriptors: philosophy of education, teaching/learning/student/faculty Feminist philosophies and academic women's teaching: interviews and events in a foreign country ABSTRACT The foreign country focused on in this paper is Norway. What was not foreign about it was, amongst other things, the familiarity of an academic culture. Based at the Women's Research Centre at Oslo University, the research project concerns academic women's pedagogical practices and desires. Disciplines represented in the project include medicine, anthropology, science, linguistics, education, sociology, theology etc. From an OSP experience of five months, the researcher now attempts to locate herself subjectively within the deconstructions she makes of the research data. As data, she has produced ethnographic notes, recorded her (mostly English language) conversations with Norwegian women and collected their writings about their pedagogies or paths of learning. Theoretical questions regarding cultural framings of knowledge, desires and differences have led her to regard philosophy itself as a site for dislocation. Feminist pedagogies are about blood transfusions from women's cultures to academia. Such pedagogies are also quite often about radical ideas regarding disciplines, validity and acknowledgment. Because of this, many women academics say they relate differently to their students and to what is to be learned. Examining questions of otherness, and working in a range of faculties, feminist theorists rarely call themselves philosophers. This can be read as a sign of their resistance to particular discourses. This paper argues that feminist pedagogues are intensely engaged in putting particular feminist philosophies into practice. The paper will be illustrated with fragments from the data. This is the first paper I have written about my new research project. It is really too early to be giving it. I present it for my own sake: so that I am pushed into writing, and hence into what will become theoretically important for me. Of course this integration of theorising and word processing began a long time ago, when I imagined doing the research; and then when I applied to the various committees for permission to begin it. The actual data gathering took place between January and June this year. My readings of published texts able to be related to the project, its analyses and constructions, became more intense and more focused this year, as I began transferring what I had learned from doing a Doctorate (Rhedding-Jones, 1994) to another set of cultural practices and fieldworkings. As data, what was collected in first semester this year, for the purposes of deconstructings and their consequences, was much the same, methodologically, as I had pioneered previously. My PhD thesis revolved around an ethnographer's research journal, some conversational interviews and a collection of writing produced by other people. The other people were the primary school girls I worked with for three years as a researcher; and the academics whose names are in the bibliography of my dissertation. The research journal was a discursively constructed chronological record made over three years at a tiny one-teacher school, before it was closed by the Victorian State Government. As a record, the journal included what people said and did; and what they didn't. The people included me. I am also a subject of the interviews transcribed, as are the schoolgirls I talked with. The research that this paper is about has three similar sets of data: an ethnographer's journal notes, interviews and texts. I wrote the journal notes in Norway, during the five months of my OSP time at the University of Oslo's wonderful Women's Research Centre. Here the 'girls' were from sixteen to sixty years older than the ones I had worked with earlier at the rural school in Australia. And I am seven years further on from the start of that Doctoral project. In both cases I was culturally dislocated: in the first instance by the fact that I am no longer a schoolgirl; and in the second by the fact that I speak Norwegian only as a raw beginner, and am European only by ancestry. Actually Norwegians don't see themselves as European either for most of the time, and hence their resistance to continental union, despite the positions taken by the other Scandinavians (Denmark and Sweden). As Australia is located at a far edge of what is Southern, so Norway nudges the Arctic and the North, thus making redundant to my research the notion of Westernism. Identities and shifting locations are thus unavoidably a part of what I shall write about, despite my intention to research pedagogies, academic practices and the University women who teach and learn. I spent my five months constantly changing my mind about cultures and feminisms and their links. The interviews recorded in Norway were in English, as Norwegians, unlike 'us', are highly skilled multi-lingual language users. My research project involves working theories of otherness, subjectivities and discourses. As an outsider to Norwegian-ness, I was an insider to the feminist academic cultures at the Research Centre, and felt quite at home there. Further, I was an insider to the small group of innvandrer I met with three times a week to develop my oral and written language skills. In this group the people came from Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Estonia and China. Like me, what they said was limited to the everyday. As women students at University, and graduates in their own countries, two of these people are included in my research as participants in the interviews recorded. We spoke our beginners' Norwegian to each other because that is what we always do. Unlike me, they are still there, where the Welfare State provides them refuge, difference, and a passage to employment, relative affluence and a changed citizenship for the kids of their future. Luckily for me lots of foreign researchers came and presented one or three day seminars during my sojourn. They spoke English; and included Dorothy Smith, Lorraine Code, Linda Alcoff, Alice Kessler-Harris, Joan Acker, Linda Gordon and Pierre Bourdieu. I am trying to develop my theories from the work they explained: as sociologists, historians, philosophers and feminist theorists. Hence this research regards what I learned from my highly privileged position. The pedagogical events recorded in my research journal were made during these academic seminars, and others, that I attended with the women: at the Research Centre, elsewhere on the University campus and in other places. Supposedly outside pedagogic discourses were the events I recorded regarding national celebrations, social occasions and academics' interactions, in and around Oslo. Already in this paper I have given priority to the names of researchers you might know. This reads now as an Žlitist effect of British colonisation; or how to continue being empowered through using the dominant linguistic code, and name-dropping within one's own particular parameters. If I had said I attended seminars where the speakers were Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Jorun Solheim, Monica Rudberg, Gro Hagemann, Karin Widerberg and Hanne Haavind, you might not have been so impressed or envious: because you don't know them. English and its discourses thus takes over what is other to itself, and even the French must speak it sometimes.1 For Norwegian women reading or listening to this, my first listing of seminar presenters and my use of the pronoun 'you', gives a particular primacy the culture I put myself into, and which the majority of my audience supposedly comes from. By naming Bourdieu I played a trump card, especially if the other players in this academic game are men, or women not particularly into feminist publications outside the discourses of Education. Being marginalised or not are positions we both constitute for ourselves and are constituted by. I'm sorry if this has become overbearingly didactic, but I'm hoping that what I've just written demonstrates my ways of theorising as deconstructive, eclectic and experiential. There is one other point to be made from this, and that is that the word 'didactics' and the word 'pedagogy' do not have the same meaning. As native English speakers use them, 'pedagogy' is the more radical of the terms. Hence being didactic is not all that desirable to today's up-to-date theorist or practitioner in Education. When Scandinavians speak and write, the reverse applies: pedagogy has been around for ages and everyone says it to talk about what happens as learning and teaching. Didactics is for radicals, especially if they're considering the postmodern, or phenomenology, or opening up ideas, breaking with patterns of the past and seeking change. I have therefore kept this in mind when working between the cracks of translation. Feminist philosophies As an academic with a mainstream background in Philosophy before moving into feminist theories, Lorraine Code is able to call herself a feminist philosopher, and is currently employed in Canada as a Professor within that discipline. Lorraine Code's work can be read as reconstructing philosophy from a feminist position.2 She often applies what she does to the problems of medical ethics (Code, in Code et al 1988), although people referring to her work may have a wider range of interests. Her research is thus not empirical, in my understanding of the term, because she derives her theories not from the practices of the medical profession or the clients engaged with its related practices, but rather uses her theories as political forces: to create the changes feminists desire, regarding health services, healing and medical intervention. Methodologically, this is almost the opposite of what I do. I try to theorise from particular sites and events experienced, and work to change academic writing practices and related ways of theorising from them. Sometimes I use the literary device of metaphor, to imply rather than to spell out. My political practices as a feminist poststructuralist are thus hopefully functioning to question cultural framings of knowledge, desires and differences. I therefore see Philosophy itself as a site for dislocation. Although now highly educated, the cultures I often represent are those of an ordinary woman, and I try to make this explicit by my language. If this is not a working philosophy I don't know what is. Putting women into Philosophy, or taking out of Philosophy what is unwomanly, or questioning what is ma(i)nly, or doing away with Philosophy, or developing all of these (and re-locating philosophies) is qualitatively different from applying Philosophy to practical problems. Eliminating upper-case lettering, introducing multiplicities and knocking down the walls between the buildings of academia necessitates schooling a non-disciplined pedagogue. I would argue that this is what feminists in Universities are currently doing. In E/education we usually work from the classroom floor. We like to be firmly school based in what we do, even if we now earn our money from talking and writing about ideas, rather than keeping busy twenty-five six or sixteen-year-olds every day. Like many other E/education academics, I worked in a range of pre-tertiary settings, and did my share of yard duty, work program production and staff-room chat. Rising to the echelons of no school holidays, and being sometimes able to stay home and think, came slowly. In my case this was much slower than for the men I work with, because I had four kids and was married to a country high school teacher, so I had to do all my study off-campus. To become a philosopher was therefore impossible. None of the Universities I studied from offered anything that was called Philosophy, and anyway I needed a job. I shall come back to what P/philosophy is later in this paper. For now I want to indicate something of the autobiographical constructions of knowledges, sites and disciplines. Linda Alcoff is also undeniably a feminist philosopher.3 Like Code, her background is in malestream philosophy, but she is young enough to have had her Doctoral Dissertation supervised by Joan Smith, in USA. Having been a great admirer of Alcoff's work, since I first came across some of it in 1990, I was surprised to see her long fingernails and pink jacket. Why is it that I must constantly put people into boxes and then think I know it all? Alcoff said her work was not so much reformist as radical, which I think meant that she wants to not just fix up Philosophy but put a bomb under it. I don't know what Lorraine Code would have said to that, they weren't there on the same day. There was only one participant at Linda Alcoff's seminar who could legitimately claim the label of philosopher, despite the fact that one third of the participants were in the working group considering philosophy. This woman looked to be in her late twenties and is doing a feminist Doctorate supervised by a man in a Philosophy Department. There are three women in Norway with Doctorates in Philosophy, but their work is not feminist.4 What about all the women whose work is with feminist theories? They are apparently not philosophers, as naturally, neither am I. A Doctor of Philosophy, as everyone knows, is not really in Philosophy at all. If I had studied as an undergraduate in Norway, however, I would have at least done the compulsory six months of Philosophy common to each of the disciplines. As it is, Australians pick up Philosophy by osmosis, or someone else's recommendation, when we need something substantial to support what we want to write. I checked out the Norwegian undergraduates' coursework5 though, and sure enough all of the philosophers listed for study were men. I also went back to my dissertation (1994), to see who the philosophers were in it. Without doubt Jacques Derrida; with some doubt Luce Irigaray. Guyatri Spivak's a literary theorist, as is HŽlne Cixous. Jacques Lacan's a psychologist, and so was Valerie Walkerdine when she started. Elizabeth Grosz and Geneveive Lloyd are feminist philosophers, given anyone's criteria, with publications and employments in the appropriate places. They're even Australians. But my informing theorists Michel Foucault, Michel Bakhtin and Bronwyn Davies, as I read them, resist categorisation. So do the writers I've already categorised. Although Lorraine Code points out that what you know has got to be acknowledged in the right places (Code, 1991), the problem of gate-keeping seems not to be taken up by those who can claim the philosopher label. I asked Lorraine about this and she just smiled and said she doesn't do too much deconstruction of Great Men's texts these days (see Lloyd, 1984). Of course, I am acutely aware of my lack of background in Descartes, Kant, Plato, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Husserl and Wittgenstein etc, although my Masters Research Paper (Ratcliff, 1984) makes use of fragments of their work. Instead of feeling guilty about this I tell myself that no-one can do everything, and that what is happening now is more important than what happened then. Until I got to Norway this year, however, I did not know that Lorraine Code and Linda Alcoff were any more entitled to the label of philosopher than the other feminist theorists I had read. Matters of otherness, then, result in feminist theorists' life histories disallowing any claims we may make to be philosophers. In another way our lack of claims may be read as our desires to continue to be different. We simply don't want to be at the philosophers' party. Rather than claiming what is labelled as 'equity' as in the equal opportunity policies and documents, feminists wanting this position follow theories of differences, rather than theories of similarity. This recognition and reflection of difference can be read as a sign of these feminists' resistance to particular discourses: in this case the discourse of equal opportunity or equal results as leading to and stemming from the same idea of knowledge (as men and non-feminists have). In particular, discourses of equity frequently operate, even in academia, to position women as outsiders, or less than. Yes, some of us have learned the language of the oppressors of our past, but we choose to use it only sometimes. This paper attempts to look at why. In so doing, it will position women as insiders, and try to turn the garment of Philosophy inside out. For P/philosophy, this introduces not only metaphors of body but theories that include the body6 (Grosz, 1994; Cranny-Francis, 1995). Further, a postmodern philosophy will deal with the subjective (Ellis and Flaherty, 1992; Kvale, 1992), which in empirical research practice, where the knowledge stems from life experiences (Smith 1988), will include the autobiographic (Widerberg, 1994). This paper suggests that feminist pedagogues are intensely engaged in putting particular feminist philosophies into practice. These philosophies translate as differences in values, research validity, assessment criteria and practices, exemplifications, and ways of lecturing or tutoring. As a set of professional practices, these both reflect and construct differently-knowing subjects. That this is more than simply a shift with the (postmodern) times is identified and described by the women I talked with in Oslo. A pilot project in Australia the year before shows that Australian feminist academics also think otherwise, and act accordingly. Or, at least, that is what they believe happens. I suggest that this is a philosophical positioning driving the feminist cultures operating in academia. That this is not usually described as philosophy is not surprising given women's cultural locations. To explain by theories is what we are trained to do as academics who write. Calling these theories a philosophy seems presumptuous, but our pedagogical practices are based on more than sets of principles or explanations, which my little dictionary (Penguin, 1985) tells me theories are. What feminists are doing, as learning teachers and as teaching learners, deals with (our) ethics, existence and knowledge: and this, my dictionary says, is a philosophy. The questioning of naturalism and structures has traditionally been the role of philosophers, yet this is the activity feminist academics in the social sciences are constantly engaged in. That we embody our knowledge by our practices as pedagogues is not surprising, given our particular relationships to our bodies. In patriarchy, as we know, tradition is passed from father to son. Feminist pedagogues disrupt this procedure and open possibilities for daughters, biological and otherwise. So what are feminist philosophies as they relate to academic women's pedagogies? The Feminist Dictionary (Kramarae and Treichler, 1985) leaves philosophy out of its listing. 'Philosophical feminists' is there (p. 337), with the following information: 'Those who prized women's intellect and temperament'. Surely this is insufficient? Haven't all women done this? Adjectives describing women are 'democratic', 'more moral', and 'sensitive'. This seems like risky business to me. Although this is the way I think I teach, I don't go around saying it. The adjectives are embedded in a quote from Sylvia Strauss (1982, xi-xii, in Kramarae and Treichler, 1985; 337), who adds: 'Philosophical feminism ... did not discount conditioning ... but [held] that conditioning accounted for the more superficial personality traits'. Here then is an idea reflective of its publication date, its Americanism, and the prevailing forces of a behaviourist psychology and a non-discursive theory of 'personality'; without the focus on discourses as constructors of subjects, and on women as resistors and agents. What if the enquiry is made within the postmodern, where these theories are allowed? What then are feminist philosophers doing? Here I shall take my lead from Elizabeth Grosz; but before doing so, I have some other things to say. Philosophy as a discipline is thick with men. Oxford University Press's Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, for example, lists 53 of them in its contents pages (Perry and Bratman, 1986, xi-xvi); and 3 women. I do not know about the philosophers whose first names are replaced by initials, but here are the only acknowledged women philosophers: Hilary Putnam writes of 'The nature of mental states'; Judith Jarvis Thompson writes of 'A defense of abortion'; and Philippa Foot writes of 'The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect'. The book is a hardback, with 815 pages, and my copy is a left-over from my son's first year Philosophy coursework at Melbourne University. An appendix, entitled 'Reading philosophy', advises one to 'read slowly and aggressively' (1986; 813). 'Good philosophers', it says, 'develop arguments and theories of some intricacy'. Further, 'The philosopher constructs arguments, theories, positions, or criticisms in an attempt to persuade his or her most intelligent and perceptive opponents'. So here we have not only the measurements of a quantitative psychology, encouraging us to consider how intelligent our audience is, but the notion of academic work as opposition, a battle between victors and vanquished. No place here for a feminist pedagogy of collaboration, experience, multiplicity, engagement and body. On the other hand, my aggressive reading leads me to respond angrily that of course we women are philosophers, though if they are going to be there we'll move out. More rationally, my reading is that this writer writes not of philosophy but of pedagogy, and that his pedagogy matches his patriarchal and structural positioning. Returning to my quest for what this Philosophy which I have missed out on, but which I have given to my son, might be, I return to read the words of the contents pages: reason and religion, faith and subjectivity, evolution and creation, epistemology, perception, induction, causation and explanation, mind and body, minds and machines, personal identity, freedom and determinism, moral perplexities, moral theories, challenges to morality, assorted puzzles and paradoxes. There you have it. The naming of the knowledge. I feel shut out, but at the same time not really wanting to go in. The problem is not only about the natures of philosophy and the natures of pedagogy, however. It is also about what is happening to academia, disciplines and writing, now that modernism for many of us is over. Refusing the structuralist's location, the notion of 'truth' and the convenience of established rhetorical forms, the poststructuralist is up against the brick wall of the establishment. The woman sits carefully on the floor of the bookshop, her back against the wall, head held so that the blood might stop, the way she learned to do it with the kids at school, during playtime, when their noses bled. Now hers is flowing profusely, and red-ening the screwed-up handkie she's hurriedly got from her bag. Pouring the thick liquid down her throat. Stupid thing to do, to try to walk through a window of glass. Lucky it hasn't shattered. Why on earth didn't she know it was glass, and not an open door? She's been here before, buying her books, looking at the rows of foreign language texts, finding the relief of the English. University bookshops in a foreign country are always a bit like home. She's angry now that no-one has noticed. They're young. Probably claiming a rightful education, with supportive families and State, and dressed more stylishly than she's used to, on the campuses in Australia. A familiar drowning in the head comes over her. She'll have to speak. 'Excuse me'. In English this is, she's forgotten the Norwegian for it now. 'Excuse me, I'm going to faint. Can you call a doctor'? A doctor? A doctor for God's sake, that's what she is, and she keeps right away from the medical profession. Her English works. When she comes to, there's a nurse from Student Services there beside her. Telling her her nose is broken most likely and is she able yet to walk to the Medical Centre. Already then an event has intruded into my text, and events are supposed to stay in their footnotes. This section on philosophy, however, must return to Elizabeth Grosz. Although a philosopher, much of Grosz's work is psychoanalytic, and without binary choices (Grosz, 1990a), as is the work of Theresa De Lauretis (De Lauretis, 1990a; 1990b). This allows for a philosophical querying of the split between the subject and the object, and of the notion of the conscious, centred and rational agent, (which is also taken up by Walkerdine (1990) and Tong (1989). Following Grosz, and Davies (Davies, 1993), allows us also to look for signs beyond language. Grosz suggests that discourse is a material set of processes whereby physical bodies are inscribed with 'attributes of subjectivity' (1990b:63). In this way, physical movements, positionings and sounds are also important in the construction of personhood. Used metaphorically, the sites of the body (de-scribed) indicate personal meanings for those whose bodies are similar to the bodies in the text. At any rate, this is how I hope my personal writing functions. (It's not really that I'm such an exhibitionist, or so self-centred.) Taking Grosz's (1990c) direction, I follow neither Foucault nor Derrida as patterns for deconstructions, but instead devise my own: from feminist performative writings such as Irigaray's (1985) and Cixous' (Cixous, 1993). To challenge the binary oppositions of structuralism, (Grosz), by providing forms of analyses which are capable of being understood in a variety of ways, so that no singular or ultimate 'truth' is proven, I therefore attempt to write to create a feminist performance. There is no claim, then, for definitive readings of texts or data. Instead there is a challenge to dominant philosophical systems and structures (Grosz 1990a). Although this is not what Lacan did (Lacan, 1977), Lacan's structuralist work is useful,7 in that it focuses on beginning recognitions of the self, and offers an interpretation of the psychoanalytic roots of culture, masculinity and femininity. For a study of feminist pedagogies, these are important. I would argue that they also apply to feminist philosophies. Further, Lacan allows the meaning of a word to change according to psychoanalytic interpretations, and this is my argument for metaphor to be included in academic text. In linguistic theory, words do not denote something other than themselves (a nose is a nose is a nose); but in psychoanalytic theory, and also in some readings of literature, words may represent something else. Thus Lacan modified Freud's account of the fantasy of wish fulfilment, by introducing Saussure's linguistic concepts of metaphor and metonymy, and effectively adding a semiotic dimension to psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious (Grosz 1990a:4). This meant that the linguistic/literary notion of metaphor became the Lacanian psychoanalytic notion of condensation; and the linguistic/literary notion of metonomy became the Lacanian psychoanalytic notion of displacement. Displacement is also a writing strategy of Derrida's (Bennington and Derrida, 1993) and Spivak's (1985; 1991).8 Where does this leave philosophy? I leaves it out, according to some of the earlier descriptions in this section. Now maybe by following French theorists I can be excused for seeing philosophy differently; or maybe because my first degree arrived after my fourth baby I am simply blind. But I am not prepared to play the theorist only, as second cello to the philosopher's first. That poststructural theories are now so popular with women students and researchers, and that men are choosing to research 'the postmodern' instead, would seem to indicate that maybe a new misogyny is rife, and that it stems from our historic split in philosophy. I would argue that a feminist philosophy must include the psychoanalytic and the personal, as a means of including and constructing from our particular life histories and experiences (Smith, 1988, 1990). Events Sometimes in ethnography a narrative can stand alone. When the ethnography involves the postmodern, positioning a reader to be a deconstructionist involves a strategy for reading otherwise. This strategy is not new to women, who are used to locating themselves in various places around discourses. Coming out and calling this another way of doing a research analysis is stretching things a bit far maybe. But for literary readers this methodology is usual. Reading against the text, and reading into it, are perhaps reasons why many other readers can't or don't read novels. The effort is a different one: the reader's on the edge of art. In researching the socio-cultural, some of these dimensions are useful.9 Focusing on particular sites and events is a research strategy following Foucault, whose interpretive analytics are implicit in the selections made for analysis, as well as in the deconstructions that follow them. Following Foucault does not, in research practice, exclude structuralist readings, but it does allow for a theorising of social power and education change. Whilst my deconstructions have already begun as I write up the events, what I do with them afterwards is more like the deconstructing done by Derrida than by Foucault (Rhedding-Jones, 1995). Theorising power and change, though, is not what I am wanting for this paper. With a self-selected topic of philosophy, I am not, at the moment, trying to change what happens with pedagogy, nor analyse hegemony. From Foucault (1970, 1978, 1982, in Rhedding-Jones, 1994), and for this paper, I take the level of micropractices as a field for study, and isolate particular events as giving glimpses of a history of the present. The present I eventually focus on is mine: in Norway for the first five months of this year. Also following Foucault, I explore some discursive practices that constitute the subjects of my research: the women I met with, and myself. In reading my data, which comprise discursively selected events (mostly in the footnotes), and the interviews (not presented yet) I provide a history of the present. This present is not just mine and the women's: it is contemporary Norway's. An early draft of this paper, with the sub-heading above, attempted neatly boxed events, with theoretical wrapping paper tied together with bold. Because it is academic writing and not only substantive content I am endeavouring to tackle, via my topic of philosophy, I now add my asides and present a messy analysis. For the eruption of the event of the nose-break, though, I was unprepared. Maybe a feminist pedagogy is like this also. If you don't mind the surprises, quite a lot can happen if you're not too fussy about plans. Some people just want clean kitchens though, and serve up meals on time. I do that myself sometimes. Interviews By being located within cultures that are both foreign and familiar (Derrida, 1992; Kristeva, 1991) the research parallels the experiences of many women entering the University setting for the first time, as students and also as academics who teach. Following poststructural framings (Davies, 1991; Weedon, 1987), it considers cultural and feminist representations and constructions. To do so it presents a series of readings of pedagogic sites and events, as described by the women interviewed and by the researcher's ethnographic notes. These readings aim not to produce 'facts' or 'truth'. Instead, various interpretations and subjective positionings will be presented as theories: poststructural and otherwise. To do this, the interviews will eventually be considered as Inter Views10 between the researcher and the researched. This will allow for the analysis stage of the research to focus on discourses and discursive access. This means that who the interviewer is is important to the outcomes of the interviews, as each interview is seen more as a conversation than as information about one person. An implication of the preliminary theoretical findings from the Norwegian research is that women's cultures, whatever they may be, are operating, at University, to produce other forms, processes and products relating to knowledge. Thus theories of difference and diversity appear to oppose theories of equality and non-difference. Here the particular forms of feminism11 would seem to be causing or constructing the pedagogical events, relationships and their explanations. It is the pedagogical processes of construction (Gunew, 1990), agency (Davies, 1990) and resistance (Bakhtin, in Gardiner, 1992; Crisp, 1990; Mitchell, 1986; Yates, 1993) of academic learning and its life-related histories (Middleton, 1993), that this project seeks to identify. The theoretical framings of my research thus link pedagogies, feminisms and poststructural philosophies (Alcoff, 1988; Code 1991; Scott, 1990). Topics discussed during the conversational interviews regard the two discussants'12 own experiences relating to the focus of the project. In content these include: What ways of learning and teaching are particular to women? Are there some learning and teaching practices that are especially feminist or womanly? What are some non-feminist pedagogical practices? How do people become feminist or pro-feminist in their teaching? Each question or discussion topic was intended to engage participants in discussing their own experiences (Smith, 1988).13 This of course acknowledges that the research was framed by particular discursive positionings from the beginning. I did not ask the women questions about their philosophies, but later made deconstructions from what was said, and tried to be honest about my own theoretical locations. Discussions were open-ended and of approximately one hour. Such interactive interviewing has strong support as a feminist methodology (Lather, 1991; Reinhartz, 1992), though it requires that the interviewer has the appropriate skills to deal interactively with both the person being interviewed and the content. Women interviewed in Norway included undergraduate and postgraduate students and junior and senior academics. A range of Faculties is represented, as is a range of ages and ethnic/racial backgrounds.14 Some fragments of interviews follow. I present them now more as examples than as neatly theorised conclusions. By textualising the transcripts, and by locating the texts within the discourses of a feminist P/philosophy, I hope to begin a different way of re-searching. As everyday language, the interviews represent the interactive voices of women. This in itself is a shift from the language of the Philosophy text(book). In light of what I have been writing, the philosophical aspects for readers to look for (or ignore) include: mind/body, subject/object, language/meaning, rationality/irrationality, good/bad, knowledge/reality, causation/explanation, morality/immorality. Of course, all of these, by virtue of the slash of punctuation, become in poststructural theory undivided. Removing the binary split (which I hope my footnotes/maintext also achieves) is a sign of resistance to given structures, and a desire for new knowledge. By keeping the terms that Philosophy employs, and which I have placed on each side of a punctuation slash (/), feminists may be able to decide which terms need reconstruction; and whether it is in practice appropriate to provide such face-lifts. The transcript selections for this paper represent six academic women. The interviewer in each case is myself. The women re-named for the research are Marianne, Bodil, Monika, Sylvi and Agathe. Interviews took place either in my office at the Women's Research Centre at the University of Oslo,15 in the interviewee's office or in an on-campus cafeteria. We wore small lapel microphones attached to a micro-cassette recorder. Tiny umbilical cords connecting us. Marianne I was so annoyed with these old men, teaching [me] without being prepared ... without knowing where to go, and without really telling me anything, But I was annoyed with them as teachers, not as men. I just decided to do it another way [when I became an academic]. I was very young and so I had this close relation with the students. I knew what they needed. Here Marianne locates herself as other to the men comprising the Faculty. As a new young academic who is differently gendered, she is not in this extract saying what she knows. Her emphasis here is on how she presents herself as a University teacher. Leaving herself out of the picture is impossible. The interview fragment that follows next regards a woman who has no formal education in pedagogy, but because of her own experience sees teaching as different from learning.16 Bodil I have this notion ...that I am responsible for creating a learning situation, a situation where they can learn. I'm not responsible for having to say all these Things ... They have to know a certain number of Things, but they don't have to get it all from the lecture. The lecture is something different from reading. and because I did my learning from reading, ....I know that it's not the same thing,. it's just that they get it in different form. .. I feel men have to say all these Things. You know they have to kind of give people Things. Little pieces sort of. Information. Then, their job is done. And that very specific experience changed my view of what teaching is. Here Bodil sees her gendered knowledge as not about Things, but as something else. Although her academic field necessarily involves information, she believes she gives qualities beyond the transactional. Her intention then is to set up situations where this can happen. More specifically, the next woman interviewed considers her own locations as a gendered subject within academia. Monika I have very few men, boys, male students, that I supervise. Of course there are more girls than boys in [my discipline] ... and of course I'm a very strong personality ... I don't know if I missed not having more women when I was myself a student. I remember my supervisor was a woman and she was the best supervisor. And whether I chose her because she was a woman, or whether I was assigned her I don't know. But my experience is again, that women, or she as representative of her sex, are much more conscientious when they go into supervision work. Here Monika makes clear the conscientiousness of women supervisors. That she sees supervision as a textual practice is apparent from her shift into the next topic: her colleagues' readings of her academic writing. Again, the emphasis is on relationships between people, and therefore on knowledge as a shared construction rather than as something 'out there'. M. That's the feedback that I get too [from her students, about her supervision]. You know, that I am very detailed. You know, I go into the text. J. Yes, you read it carefully. M. A lot of work. Though you know I have male colleagues who I often give my articles to, to get a comment back, and they're always at a very general level. I can never expect to get back, 'Well why don't you put this paragraph there?' or 'You should restructure it'. It will be more at the level of ideas, and 'This doesn't make sense'. J. Not sort of co-writing. M. Yes, never detailed comments. J. Mmm. M. And that, I look for a woman to work with. Here a problem with men's work, for this woman, is identified. If researching, as closely related to our academic teaching, requires a womanly audience, then probably this indicates the reverse also: that a masculine culture operates differently from the cultures of women. I would say that this extends to what we desire to read, as well as for whom we imagine we write. The next woman speaks of values, and what begins our process of teaching and constructing knowledge differently. Sylvi Is it with my eyes that makes me think that this is important? I can see with my own work that it very often happens at the start. It's a discovery, that something happens to me. It comes out from that. I do not start with somebody else. I very often start with myself. Again, there is the sense that this speaker is not afraid of inserting the self, but has to do so from within a culture of a male academy. S. You know you don't come high up in positions in Norway with female values. If you say that there is something called female values, female learning, I mean you have to sort of do it on the men's terms. They allow you to do it. Maybe that's the difference. The sort of male dominance, you know, you have to do it on their terms. J. Mmm. S. There is one thing that the Norwegian system is pushing, and you can find it in England as well... but with the Norwegian system we have this very heavyweight theory, very heavy. J. I am heavily into theory, but I am not good at talking it. S. No, but it's what they define as theory. I'm heavily into theory too ... but it's the way the language does it. The way you defend it and the way you talk about it, that makes it not look like theory. J. That's right. I've only just started to realise I should be using the word 'philosophy'. And I've avoided it. Because I don't want to be like the blokes who are philosophers. And I'm not going to be constantly quoting the Big Boys. S. No, but that's the thing. You're supposed to do that. J. That's right. S. You're supposed to, to, to, to quote the Big Boys. And I have put this on my blackboard. Maybe I say this in Norwegian [Here my beginner's translating skill lets me down. She does the job for me] 'A lot of people read because they do not bother to think'. You know, this man says this, and this man says that, and you have to know their names. Precisely, she's located my problem with famous philosophers. I forget who said what, and I don't particularly care. Or is this my excuse because I lack what counts? No, it's what she says: I am trying to think for myself. And I want women around me. S. It's interesting because all these men, they come here, and they come here with their papers, and I can see that they are fighting with her [a well-known feminist theorist from England], and not even giving her the credit. They are fighting. (laughs) J. Yeah. S. And it's, it's so obvious. I mean because of the positions. You know, our different way of thinking. As a critical feminist, then, Sylvi describes the visit of an English researcher, whose theories the men in the audience strongly resist. The notion of higher education as competing theories is firmly entrenched in Norwegian (and non-Norwegian) academic practices. To fight, therefore, is constructed not as male aggression, or masculine desire for victory, but as a naturalised academic rite. The Norwegian word for PhD examiner translates as 'opponent', which I am certainly glad I managed to avoid by being Australian. Norwegian women, however, do not see this as a problem. In fact, the very word for competition translates literally as 'to run together with' (konkuranse). Researching within citizenship boundaries is thus a complex of cultural constructions, where discourses and languages operate otherwise. The last women quoted from in this paper is Agathe. In my efforts to find a feminist philosophy I am finding many other things too. Here Agathe explicitly states that what she does is both feminist and philosophical. Agathe There are all kinds of students. Some are teachers, some are nurses, some are doctors, some are dentists, some work in the post {office?], some are in private enterprise, all kinds. J. Are they all women? A. Yes, all women. And I said to them, 'I feel very safe with this group and that is why I share my experiences' ... And then afterwards they talked about different traditions .... and it was just developing in a very nice way, and they too could share with others their opinions and their ways and we came very close. And that was a strong experience for me. J. What's the difference between that as feminist teaching and as good teaching? A. Good teaching? Um, well I do some good teaching too, I tell them about theorists, that's good teaching: this person, this philosopher has said so and so. But I have to transform it in my own way. It is this transformation which feminists do, but which is not usually considered as philosophy, which I try to focus on. Being an applying philosopher is perhaps a contradiction in terms; and certainly feminism is not applying Philosophy as it has been written. It is more like a fusion of practices (pedagogies) with biographies (personal knowledges) and theoretical interrogations (feminist readings and writings). I add my bit to the continuing conversation with Agathe. J. I think that in our different ways we've both tried to do some things that were similar. A. Yes. J. But one thing, and I've learned many things since then [when I last met her, two years earlier] but one is that my learning is very closely related to my research and what I have written as a scholar, rather than what somebody told me, or even what I read in a book. A. Mmm. J. What would you say about that? A. I think that the most valuable thing I can give to the students is what I have experienced myself. J. Yes. A. And I also can see very clearly from them whether I speak from my head or whether I speak from my heart. Following my earlier location of myself as a writing subject, Agathe then connects my idea about learning to her own history as a feminist pedagogue. A. I haven't come to it through the Women's Movement. That has not been my way. I have come to it through my reading. And not by walking in [feminist processions]. ... I came to feminism through a book that I translated. Whether the women whose words I have 'used' for my research purposes are constructing philosophies, or not, is a structuralist's question. In one way I am disappointed not to have the answers I want from my data. In another I know it is I who have to do the philosophy. The lack of a split between body and mind, between published text and lived experience, and between the public and the private is often quite clear from what the women say. None of these women acknowledges the poststructural theories that I see underlying their approaches to knowledge, however. Have I simply found an unacknowledged poststructuralism in (their) feminisms? Or is there something more? As a first attempt to write a conference paper from recently made transcriptions I hope that such theoretical holes can be excused. A foreign country Here there is an untellable etymology for the last word in this heading. In old English, the referent is unmistakably feminine. With patriarchal power being as it has been, the name of the female genitals became a derogatory term. The Penguin English Dictionary gives as a second meaning 'sexual intercourse - used by men', and as a third meaning 'an unpleasant person' (1985; 202). Despite this, and also because of it, I employ the word with its 'O' inserted. This my dictionary defines as 'an indefinite extended expanse of land', and 'the land of a person's birth, residence or citizenship'. Further, to be countrified is to be 'rural, rustic, unsophisticated' (1985; 189), thus exemplifying modern structuralism's binary split between what is sophisticated or urban, and what is lacking sophistication or rural: and driving me back into my locations as a PhD candidate (Rhedding-Jones, 1994) researching the rural and the feminine. Positioning women as other and less than is not a new phenomenon. I need hardly make the point. But the lack of escape from the position, even in language, and certainly in signs, discourses and what is taken up unconsciously, is what I am attempting to articulate. Intending to focus on the descriptor of 'foreign', I write of the foreign object, knowing my self to be the subject. For men, in these ways, a seemingly innocent word may remain so. Pedagogy, for example, has not been labelled as masculinist, yet women want to make public the difference that a feminist pedagogy might make (McWilliam, 1994; Middleton, 1993; Weiler, 1988; Weiner, 1994). My own biographic struggle to resist the behavioural objectives so popular with my colleagues at work17 was an embryonic version of my now overt position as agent of change. To challenge the status quo is easier, however, once one has a greater academic capital. In one way I went to the foreign country to find out what feminist philosophies are. I asked the women what they did and what they thought. If teaching and learning are not linked to views of the world, its constructions of knowledge and its carrying out of theoretical positions, then pedagogy as a science and as an art has no philosophical foundations. Being without foundations, however, is not all that scary for a woman who got rid of much of this kind of support quite a long time ago. If philosophy is not to be foundational but transformational, then there is perhaps no problem with integrations of life experiences with intellectualisms. For academic women desiring gendered and subjective inserts into praxis, there is still the dilemma of validity, of asserting what you know beyond the confines of others who know it too. When this can happen, a different philosophy may be able to be born. Until it is we will continue to have women who speak their knowledge to each other; and women outside philosophy. REFERENCES Alcoff, L. (1988) Cultural feminism versus poststructuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory. Journal of women in culture and society. 13 (3):405-435. Bakhtin, M, in M. Gardiner (1992) The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology. London, Routledge. pp 161-166. Bennington, J. and Derrida, J. (1993) Jacques Derrida.. (G. Bennington, trans) Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Cixous, H. (1993) Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, trans) New York, Columbia University Press. Code, L., Mullett, S. and Overall, C. 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(1981) Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms. In Doing Feminist Research. (ed H. Roberts) London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Opie, A. (1989) Qualitative methodology, deconstructive readings, appropriation of the "Other" and empowerment'. Paper presented at TASA Conference, La Trobe University. Penguin Books (1985)The Penguin English Dictionary. Middlesex, England. Perry, J. and Bratman, M. (1986) Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings. New York, Oxford University Press. Ratcliff, J. (now Rhedding-Jones) (1984) Curriculum Text: a Case Study in Language. MEd Dissertation, Faculty of Education, Geelong, Deakin University. Rhedding-Jones, J. (1994) 'Girls, Subjectivity and Language: from Four to Twelve in a Rural School' PhD thesis. La Trobe University. Rhedding-Jones, J.(1995) 'What do you do after you've met poststructuralism? Research possibilities regarding feminism, ethnography and literacy'. Journal of Curriculum Studies. Rhedding-Jones, J. (1996a) 'Researching early schooling: poststructural practices, academic writing and ethnography'. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 17(1). Rhedding-Jones, J. (1996b) 'Positionings poststructural: some Australian research in education'. Nordisk Pedagogik (Pedagogy in the Nordic Countries), 16(1). Scott, J. (1990) Deconstructing equality versus difference: or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism, in Conflicts in Feminism, M. Hirsch and E. Fox Keller (eds), New York: Routledge. Smith, D. (1988) The Everyday World as Problematic: a Feminist Sociology. Sussex, Milton Keynes. Smith, D. (1990) The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Spivak, G.C. (1985) 'Interview with Barbara Creed, Freda Freiberg and Andrea Mc Laughlan'. (Introduction by E. Gross). Art Network. Winter, 20-27. Spivak, G.C. (1991) 'Feminism in decolonization'. Journal of feminist cultural studies. 3(3):139-175. (with comment by J. Scott) Tong, R. (1989) Feminist Thought: a Comprehensive Introduction. Boulder, Westview Press. Universitetsforlaget (1995) StudiehŒndbok Examen Pgilosophicum: Forberedende Pr¿ve i Filosofi og vitenskapsteori vŒren 1995.. Walkerdine, V. (1990) Schoolgirl Fictions. London, Verso. Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford, Basil Blackwell; Weiler, K. (1988) Women Teaching for Change: Gender, Class and Power . Massachusetts, Bergin and Garvey. Weiner, G. (1994). Feminisms in Education: an Introduction, Buckingham, Open University Press, Widerberg, K. (1994) Kunnskapens Kj¿nn: Minner, Refleksjoner og Teori The Sex/Gender of Knowledge: Memories, Reflections and Theory' (my translation) Oslo, Pax Forlag. Yates, L. (1993) Introduction (ed) Feminism and Education. Melbourne Studies in Education,. Melbourne, La Trobe University Press; 1 Luce Irigaray spoke French when I attended her seminar in Oslo in May 1994. The translation was Swedish, of which I at that time understood nothing whatsoever. During Irigaray's silences and the translator's sounds, I somehow remembered my Australian schoolgirl's French, and managed to take a full day and a half of notes, scribble and guesses. By the time I found the courage in the lunch break to ask her to sign my English language copy of her most recently translated publication (Irigaray, 1993b) I was so overwhelmed and exhausted that I asked her in Norwegian. Of course she understood nothing and I awkwardly walked away. At the end of the day I made my request again, this time in my best French. She laughed. You see, I have a French name. Ë Jeannette she wrote: to me. Pierre Bourdieu spoke English (15. 5. 95), as did Jacques Derrida (29.10.93), both presenting seminars at the University of Oslo to packed auditoria. Irigaray's public seminar was followed by a day of about twenty-five of us sitting around an open square of tables; and preceded by hugs and kisses. I had no desire to ask Bourdieu for his signature. In fact I own only one other author-signed publication. Bronwyn Davies, who later became one of my PhD's examiners, wrote 'Best wishes' and her first name in my 1989 copy of Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales (Davies, 1989), when I attended its book launch during a sociology conference (TASA, December 1989, La Trobe University, Melbourne.) My request was my introduction to her. 2 I attended two days of seminars with Lorraine Code as the leader (Senter for Kvinnersforskning, Universitetet i Oslo. 1-2 June 1995). After her public lecture the day before, I was invited to join the group of 20 women employed in, and studying, medicine. They had travelled from all over Norway, and some of them presented their research, in English, for Lorraine's critique. Kirsti Malterud, who organised the days, is Professor of Medicine at Bergin University, and is doing innovative feminist pedagogy with medical students. Two of the women I met on these seminar days became volunteer interviewees for my research project. 3 Linda Alcoff and Linda Gordon were together in Oslo presenting feminist seminars for three days (19-21 June, 1995). Participants were limited to 35 in number and quite a few women were turned away. As with other seminars, the participants came from all over Norway, with some from the other Nordic countries as well. (Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway comprise the Nordic Countries.). On the last day we were grouped by the organisers into three evenly sized groups, according to our research backgrounds and interests - as either philosophers, historians or researchers not wanting to speak English. In the Chinese restaurant that night I noticed once again that visiting overseas scholars are skilled chopstick users. Nordic women, f¿rste og fremst however, are accessing academic discourses, from within and without their native languages, which they call the 'mother tongue'. Their agentic pedagogies for themselves include inviting well known foreign researchers into their midst, and providing womanly settings for academic women workers. These strategies are economically possible because of parliamentary policies supported by the large numbers of women politicians and women leaders. Not only women academics have advantages. No-one had to pay to hear Pierre Bourdieu either; though it cost women participants at Australia's Deakin University (December 1993) $50 for a day of Patti Lather and Gaby Weiner, and $70 for a day of Sandra Harding (June 1994). 4 This information was supplied during coffee breaks and formal discussion sessions, by the women I worked with during these seminars. As with all 'information', I may have got this wrong; and 'wrongness' is even more likely for people speaking languages other than their own - as I was often trying to do. 5 Universitetsforlaget (1995) StudiehŒndbok Examen Pgilosophicum: Forberedende Pr¿ve i Filosofi og vitenskapsteori vŒren 1995.. 6 Here sociologist Karin Widerberg, who is Swedish, but writes from Norway, theorises knowledge as not only gendered but sexed. The Scandinavian languages allow for this theory by having the one word for both. Kunnskapens Kj¿nn: Minner, Refleksjoner og Teori (1994) is 'The Sex/Gender of Knowledge: Memories, Reflections and Theory' (my translation). Widerberg's work here is highly personal. As a Professor of Sociology she deals with philosophical problems related to reason, knowledge, sexuality and experience, arguing for objectivity in a feminist perspective, and presenting powerfully autobiographic examples. Anne Cranny-Francis' The Body in the Text (1995) is the most recent Australian publication to come to my attention. What I try to do with my research into life events is treat my research journal as a text for (psycho)analysis. This involves applying literary deconstructive practices to socio-cultural events and sites. I see this as putting poststructural theories into empirical research practices (Rhedding-Jones, 1996b). 7 On the one hand Lacan allows us to theorise female subjects as social and historical effects, rather than as biological givens: and this allows me to theorise what happens psychically, as a social history of the present, and as women talk. On the other hand, Lacan's work is patronising and condescending to women (Grosz 1990a:184). 8 And condensation is what you must have if you are to get into those international refereed journals. A radical means of accomplishing condensation is metaphor/metonymy. Though for novelists and short story writers this is not news, for social scientists the use of metaphor will probably result in publication rejection. One way around this is to publish ethnography, which many readers will not read as metaphor, but which some will understand otherwise (Rhedding-Jones, 1996a). 9 I explain this for an audience unused to these ideas in Nordisk Pedagogik (Pedagogy in the Nordic Countries). Here my explanations are highly structured for most of the article, but at the end I give some examples of what I 'mean' (Rhedding-Jones, 1996a). The article evolved from the papers I gave at the Australian TASA (Sociology) Conference in December 1994 and at the Nordic Conference for Pedagogy (NFPF) in Denmark, March 1995. I also gave seminars on this topic at the University of Oslo (February 1995). My article in Nordisk Pedagogik is being published in Australia by Deakin University (1996) as part of its Distance Education coursework for Master of Education students: EAX787, Research Methodology. 10 Following the theoretical work of Danish/Norwegian researcher Steinar Kvale (1994), who works with Inter Views to query philosophical assumptions. I am indebted to Steinar Kvale for his openness to ideas, his welcome to Denmark, and the free copy of Psychology and Postmodernism (Kvale, 1992) he gave me after I presented my paper at NFPF (Nordic Association for Research in Education). My research methodology also follows the work of Anne Opie (1989) and Anne Oakley (1981) regarding feminist interviewing. 11 Gaby Weiner (1994) clearly explains what has happened to ideas regarding liberal, radical and socialist feminisms since the terms began to be used in feminist debates. I have found that in Northern Hemisphere debates there is little interest in these divisions of feminisms. Identifying someone else's feminism and giving it a label is in any case highly problematic, especially when the discourses involved include a language other than one's first. In some ways, the Norwegian women's interviews may be read by an Australian as liberal feminism at work. Mostly though the interviews should be read quite differently. 12 The interviewer and the interviewee. 13 I spent three days with Dorothy Smith in Oslo (23-27 March 1995). The first was at the Women's Research Centre; the second was with Karin Widerberg's postgraduate students in the Sociology Department; and the third was with lecturers at Akershus Teachers' College. Smith's idea that experience is what knowledge is about, is taken up by Norwegian women as two forms of experience (with words to match). Implications of this dual positioning were discussed by participants at the seminars with Linda Alcoff and Linda Gordon (June 1995). 14 I thank very sincerely the women I worked with, and those who invited me to Norway to do the research. Tusen takk ogsŒ til Sigmund Ongstad. My initial invitation came from Berit s, when I met her in New York in 1990 at the 4th World Congress of Women: a small group of us met for breakfast each morning at 7.30 to discuss feminist pedagogies. Written invitations came later from Fride Eeg-Henriksen and Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen at the Women's Research Centre at the University of Oslo. I had to wait until I'd finished the Doctorate before I could take up the invitation, as OSP from Deakin University. 15 The Women's Research Centre is a whole floor of a building. Between 20 and 30 women share the space, as full-time researchers, administrative officers, postgraduate students and visiting Professors. Each day about 15 of them sit down to lunch together and talk about their lives and their work (in Norwegian or Danish). Seminars are organised around the lunch table, and also in the seminar room, where other women, and occasionally men, participate in workshops and listen to women speakers. Women are writing here at all hours of the day, evenings and weekends, so mostly the offices are quiet. There is an excellent library of recently published feminist books and journals, across all disciplines; women's paintings, posters and photographs; a visiting computer adviser and fix-it person; first class printing facilities; flowers, community kitchen, table cloths, laughter and chat. I did a lot of listening. Gradually, I managed to say the everyday things in Norwegian and to follow quite a lot of what was said (by photocopiers as well as people). I sat for and passed a three hour written exam and a fifteen minute 'oral' as a University student studying Trinn 2 Norwegian. (This was not my first visit to Norway.) For the interviews, I asked for volunteers who were interested in the project on feminist pedagogies. Mostly I met the women where they worked, and we spoke English. Two of the women who studied Norwegian with me asked to be interviewed in Norwegian. 16Because I do not want these women able to be identified in Norway, I omit information about them that would give them away. The women quoted in this paper are practising as academic teachers within the fields of Science. the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Mostly employed at the Professor level, their students are postgraduates and undergraduates. 17 In the early 1980s this became like Betty Friedan's 'the problem with no name' for me. I had no access to the discourses that might have allowed me to understand my desires for subject as agent. What I did was pretend I had objectives, and write them down after the events. Curriculum for me as teacher/lecturer became a back-to-front process which I kept quiet about. It wasn't only behaviourism I 'objected' to. Liberal humanism and the assumption of singular truth gave no space for locating multiplicity, confusion and omission. As I felt myself to be engaged in all of these there was no room for me in theory. An early attempt to present my positions (Ratcliff, 1984) resulted in a Masters Research Paper assessed at only a Credit. For three years afterwards I retired from academic writing, to lick my wounds and read.