"She Is Experimental, Resourceful, and Sympathetic": Toxic White Womanhood as a Persona and Performance

• In Event: Bodies in/on the Margins of Education History

Abstract

In this paper, we theorized white womanhood as a performance and persona in education. We used critical discourse analysis to analyze professional association materials from 1906-1936. Our analysis isolated three performances of the toxic white womanhood in early 1900s school-based services: 1) the exclusionary social and material gains of “her” professionalization, 2) “her” reinforcement of racial-gender-class hierarchies, and 3) “her” strategic use of helper identity to mask social control. We traced how these performances coalesced into a collective professional persona, operating beyond the scope of individual practitioners. We close with a discussion “her” long shadow and contemporary performances, outlying the ways toxic white womanhood operates as a form of incremental violence impacting the provision of social services in public schools.

Authors

• Samantha Guz, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Brianna Suslovic, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author