White Masculinities in Common? A Gendered Archaeology of School Reforms

• In Event: 63.029 - Common Core and Legacies of Race/Poverty: Contesting the Promising but Complicated Premise of Comparable Education

Abstract

Working from the perspective social psychoanalysis (e.g., Pinar 2004; Reynolds & Webber, 2009), critical white studies (Dyer, 1988, Hall, 1981; West, 1990), and masculinities (Connell, 1995; Tolson, 1977), this historical essay takes up the documentarian archaeological method (Foucault, 1972) in developing a history of neoliberal reforms in education with special emphasis on racialized and gendered representations. Using primary and secondary documents as data for hermeneutic analysis that include key neoliberal (e.g., Goldwater, 1960, 1962; Phillips, 1969) and educational statements (e.g., Bestor, 1953/1985; Bruner, 1960; Rickover, 1960) from the 1950 and 1960s, this genealogical history will outline the racial and gendered anxieties that historically constituted neoliberal school reform of the present moment.
Excavating primary and secondary documents as “data” for archaeological analysis (Foucault, 1972), this historical essay will trace, deepen, and broaden trajectories laid out in Apple (2000), Pinar (2004), and Reynolds and Webber (2009) explaining the ascendance of the Republican hegemony (Phillips, 1969) that, despite “Democratic administrations” like that of Clinton or Obama, clearly set the political and educational agenda in the Postwar Period (Judt, 2005). Of particular importance in the genealogical content that emerged from this excavation is the clearly racialized civil rights anxieties and masculinized Cold War rhetoric – variously “refined,” “edited out,” “made over,” or “cleaned up” – in all children or common education discourses of the present moment. The scholarly significance of this paper its archeological reading of primary and secondary documents along these lines of racialized civil rights anxieties and masculinized Cold War rhetoric, which yields contemporary perspectives on the abject yet socially-and-historically conscientized past, progressive-critical reversals, and institutionally “cornered” new left politics in ways that we can understand and do something about it.

References
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Author

• James C. Jupp, Georgia Southern University