Erasing female teachers from feminist work: The Man Cave and the Misogyny Pipeline.

A history of feminist critique in education scholarship highlights the problematic erasure of women’s expertise in the education profession, despite the fact that women comprise the majority of the workforce. Renewed attention to this issue is urgent in the context of scholarship advocating for an increased role for men and boys in gender justice work, and the meteoric rise of organisations such as Tomorrow Man and The Man Cave, a charity that is increasingly being employed by schools in Australia to run programs for boys on positive masculinity. In this paper we employ a discursive, textual analysis of a corpus of texts related to The Man Cave and its founder Hunter Johnson, including the website, Instagram and media publications by and about them to scrutinise the cultural work of the organisation and consider its implications for gender justice in education. We argue that while organisations such as The Man Cave might appear to provide answers to transforming gender justice at first glance, outsourcing this gender justice work must be considered within a broader hierarchical regime in education that systematically works to exclude the emotional and professional labour of women teachers who work with boys in schools every day. By giving this gender justice word to men – in particular, men who are embedded in the social and cultural structures that are arguably part of the problem – we argue that the erasure of female teachers' labor and expertise continues. We suggest some ways forward for school leaders and other organisations interested in gender justice.