Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives in Education

Lynn Raphael Reed

In this chapter I explore a range of tensions within a number of dominant discursive positions on power and method, and voice some uncertainties, intuitions and possible insights in relation to the research act and researcher identity. In particular I question paradoxical certainties within certain postmodernist, poststructuralist and feminist perspectives, challenge persistent attempts to fragment our identities through the lens of social and intellectual critique and untidy some current conceptions of autobiography, voice and identity by asking about the 'unconscious'. I conclude by describing ways in which I have tried to integrate and act upon the ideas expressed here in my own work as a teacher and researcher, specifically in relation to my work on masculinity and schooling, and articulate some wider implications for our pedagogic and research practices.

I had a dream last night. In it, I was working in the margins of a gloomy and
dusty vestibule in a university; the place where people came to pick up their mail.
Congregating here were a number of eminent and published feminist academics.
One of them I had wrapped and bound in long strips of parchment linen, and
lain down next to her on the ground. In my dream I knew that I was wondering
whether she could be my mummy. It was only on rising that the significance of
the ambiguity of that term became open to my conscious exploration.

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