Abstract:
Feminist education scholarship has long argued that texts can engage students with questions of gender justice, yet sparse recent work focuses on being a feminist English/literacy teacher. In a post-feminist cultural context characterised by renewed public interest in feminism and gender justice, alongside vitriolic new forms of backlash against feminism, text teaching for gender justice has become a highly complex project. This paper reports on a self-study of one feminist English teacher working for gender justice in a co-educational senior Literature classroom in an Australian school. It investigates the complexities of enacting a feminist teacher stance in this context. It shows some of the conflicting and contiguous injunctions the teacher-researcher experienced and how the coming together of different bodies (classroom, curriculum material, students) makes text teaching for gender justice a complex pursuit. It explores the variety of discourses and materials that both teacher-researcher and her students were able to activate and the effects of these on possibilities for gender justice. We argue that research that attends to curriculum work and the life of a feminist teacher-researcher offers new and fruitful insights into how post-feminism operates as a cultural form.