Refractory accounts of feminist educational policy work: the case of Gender Equity: A Framework For Australian Schools

Abstract

AbstractFeminist engagement in education policy in Australia has been extensive and impactful, with periods of high activity and influence in the past through to a present where it seems difficult to find feminist voices in policy spaces. There are diverse perspectives on the earlier decades of feminist policy influence that shift according to context, the social and political milieus of each moment, location, and position within the policy assemblage. In this paper I focus on the era of the mid 1990s, and the national policy Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997) as a case of policy emergence, mutation and dissipation. Drawing on my own recollections and interviews with eleven policy actors who were variously involved in the gender and education policy work around that time, I explore processes, strategies, obstacles and affordances of the times through four types of trouble: policy trouble, patriarchal trouble, school trouble, and genders and sexualities trouble. I offer these as refractory accounts of feminist policy work, that might break through linear accounts and add further nuance and context to our revisiting of feminism in education.