C. Lewin & B. Somekh (Eds.), Research Methods in the Social Sciences Second Edition 2009. Thousand
Oaks: Sage.


CHAPTER 37: FEMINISM/POST-STRUCTURALISM


BRONWYN DAVIES, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA


SUSANNE GANNON, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA


KEY CONCEPTS

Feminist poststructuralist theory can be taken as a third feminism, historically following on from,
but not replacing, liberal feminism and radical feminism (Kristeva, 1981). Whereas liberal feminism
mobilizes a discourse of individual rights in order to gain access to the public domain, and
radical feminism celebrates and essentializes womanhood in order to counteract the negative
constructions of women and girls in masculinist discourse, feminist poststructuralism troubles the
binary categories male and female, making visible the constitutive force of linguistic practices,
and dismantling their apparent inevitability.


Poststructuralist analysis begins, then, with the discursive and regulatory practices in the texts
of science, of literature, of philosophy and of everyday life. It calls into question the grand
narratives through which the humanist/modernist individual is made into the heroic, creative origin
of him- or herself, and it shows, in contrast, how individuals and their social and geographical
worlds are made possible in relation to each other. Feminist poststructuralist theorizing focuses
in particular on the specific processes whereby individuals are made into gendered subjects.


Feminist poststructuralism makes visible, analyzable and revisable, in particular, the male/female
and straight/lesbian binaries, which are, in turn, mapped on to other binaries such as adult/child,
normal/abnormal, rational irrational. Through analysis of texts and talk, it shows how relations of
power are constructed and maintained by granting normality, rationality and naturalness to the
dominant term in any binary, and in contrast, how the subordinated term is marked as other, as
lacking, as not rational. Through examining the ways the social inscribes itself on the individual,
and by calling into question the construction of the individual in the essentializing terms of
humanist and modernist theories, poststructuralist theory shows how it is that power works not just
to shape us as particular kinds of being, but to make those ways of being desirable such that we
actively take them up as our own.


This approach troubles ‘foundational ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies’ (St.Pierre and
Pillow, 2000: 2) and opens up the possibility of a different kind of agency. That agency is no
longer the defining feature of the successful, powerful, heroic, lone individual, retracing well
worn narrative trajectories, but that of the subject-in-relation who is, in Deleuzian terms, open
to the not-yet-known (Deleuze, 2004).  That subject-in-relation is an ethical subject, who is
reflexively aware of the constitutive force of her discursive practices, and of the particular
social, historical moments, and material contexts in which her ongoing differenciation (becoming
other than she was before) is made possible. She is thus capable of disrupting the signifying
processes through which she constitutes herself and is constituted. As Butler (1992: 13) says, the
‘subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying
process’.


In this way poststructuralist feminism breaks with theoretical frameworks in which gender and
sexuality are understood as inevitable, and as determined through structures of language, social
structure and cognition. The agency that feminist poststructuralism opens up does not presume
freedom from discursive constitution and regulation of self (Davies, 2000). Rather it lies in the
capacity to recognize that constitution as historically specific and socially regulated, and thus
as able to be called into question. Agency is contingent on the discourses at play and on our
positioning within them (Davies 2008). Not only are we constituted through multiple and
contradictory discourses, but how those discursive positionings are read opens up or closes down
the possibility of agency. Through writing we can open up strategies for resisting, subverting,
decomposing the discourses themselves through which we are constituted (Barthes, 1977; Davies and
Gannon, 2009).


In poststructuralist analysis the rational conscious subject is decentred, and the play of desire
and the unconscious are made relevant. Old ways of knowing such as through master or grand
narratives, are resisted as arbiters of meaning, even while they are recognized as having
constitutive force. It is not that the grand narratives with their rational, agentic heroes no
longer have force, but they are read against the grain of dominant ways of seeing.


New subjectivities may be generated through poststructuralist activities of reading and writing,
not through opposition and resistance but through a series of escapes, of small slides, of plays,
of crossings, of flights -- that open (an other, slippery) understanding. (Cixous and Derrida,
2001). Agency in poststructuralist writing is not understood, then, in terms of an individual
standing outside or against social structures and processes. Agency becomes instead a recognition
of the power of discourse, a recognition of one’s love of, immersion in and indebtedness to that
discourse, and also a fascination with the capacity to generate life; not just the endless
repetition of old habituated practices, but the generation of new life-forms, life-forms capable of
disrupting old meanings of gender, even potentially over-writing or eclipsing them. We are thus
subjects-in-process, subjects-in-relation, and through ongoing processes of differenciation we may
eclipse the gendered discourses and regulatory practices through which we are constituted (Davies
and Gannon, 2009).


While the ‘discursive turn’ of poststructural theory has led feminists to attend to the
constitutive effects of language, and to develop powerful strategies for deconstructing gendered
binaries, recent work by feminist poststructuralists turns further towards ‘spatiality’ and
‘materiality’. In work influenced by Deleuze, for example, subjectivity can be understood as an
‘assemblage’ of flows of desire and affect of varying speeds and intensities, not bounded but
constituted in relation to other human and non-human subjects, spaces, times, surfaces and events.
The subject is thus always ‘non-unitary’ and ‘inhabits a time that is the active tense of
continuous becoming’ (Braidotti, 2002: 62).


Feminist poststructuralist research is focused on the possibility of moving beyond what is already
known and understood. Its task is not to document differences between those categorized as men and
those categorized as women, but to multiply possibilities, to de-massify ways of thinking about
‘male’ and ‘female’ -- to play with the possibility of subjectivities that are both and neither --
to understand power as discursively constructed and spatially and materially located. Discourse, or
more properly, discursive practices, have the power to hold the normative order in place, and the
power to open up the not-yet-known. In the analysis of gendered discursive practices in texts and
talk, the following summary may be useful a useful guide to help avoid some of the pitfalls
generated by adherence to scientific principles and “evidence-based-practice” much loved by
contemporary managerialists intent on controlling academic practice:


 1. ‘Data’ do not stand as transparent evidence of that which is real. Accounts or descriptions or
performances of gendered ways of being reveal not the truth of gender, but the ways in which sense
is being made of gender, or the way gender is being performed in that particular text and context.
 2. The way that sense is made of gender in accounts or descriptions or performances is not of
interest because it might reveal something about the individual sense-maker, or about his or her
motives or intentions. Rather, interest lies in the insight it may give us into the processes of
subjectification and the kinds of gendered subjectivities that are available within particular
discourses.

3.      Subjectification involves the simultaneous imposition and active take-up of the gendered
conditions of existence (Butler, 1997). Discourses do not originate in the subject, yet each
subject takes them up as her own, defends them, desires their maintenance, and understands herself
in terms of them.
 4. The language that is found in texts and talk is not of interest because it reveals something
other than itself. It is interesting because it may be deconstructed and broken open to show the
ways in which the real is constructed, for example through binary categorisations, through
habituated, unreflected repetitions, and through particular repeated images, storylines and modes
of explanations.
 5. Researchers are not separate from their data. The complexity of the movement between knowledge,
power and subjectivity requires researchers to survey gender from within itself. They use their own
bodies, affects and relations with others (both human and not human) as texts to be read.
 6. “Science” is the product and practice of systemic  discourses that produce knowledge in ways
that are, notwithstanding the fact that they are generally highly regarded, not necessarily better
than others (Lather, 2007). Furthermore, scientific discourses and practices may be seen to produce
the very thing they set out to measure. The psy-sciences, for example, are themselves implicated in
the production of the liberal humanist gendered subject (Henriques et al., 1998).
 7. Neither the gendered subject who produces the texts to be read, nor the researcher, is the
final arbiter of meanings in any text being read. Gendered experience is constituted through
multiple discourses, which give rise to ambivalent understandings and affects. Understanding
gendered experience (one’s own, and that of others) is very often through the recognition of
ambivalence and contradiction. The insistence on interpretations cleansed of doubleness,
oppositions and multiplicity is a strategy through which the illusion of the rational subject is
constituted.
 8. The point of a feminist poststructuralist analysis is not to expose the hidden truth of
sex/gender in all its simplicity, but to trouble that which is taken as stable/ unquestionable
truth.
 9. Gendered subjects exist at intersection of multiple discursive practices. The individual is not
fixed at any one of these points or locations. Not only does the individual shift locations or
positions, but what each location or position might mean changes with shifts in relation to others
(both human and non-human others) and over space and time.
10. Power is understood in terms of lines of force. It is not the property of one gender. Its
strategies, its maneuvers, its tactics and techniques are always contingent and unstable (Deleuze,
1988; Foucault, 1980).
11. Feminist poststructuralist theory is interested in the folding and unfolding of history, in the
movement from one configuration of feminism (Kristeva, 1981) or of gender (Davies, 2003) to
another, and in the lines of flight that may open up the not-yet-known. The researcher working with
poststructuralist theory may contribute to those lines of flight rather than remain simply an
observer of others’ lines of flight (Deleuze, 1988).

The example of feminist poststructuralist work we will draw on in this chapter is collective
biography. Collective biography is a poststructuralist methodology that works with the memory
stories of both researchers and research participants. It moves beyond individualized readings of
the subject’s remembered stories toward a sense of subjects who are constituted in common
discursive, relational and material spaces. In collective biography workshops convened for the
purpose of collaboratively researching a particular topic, memory stories are told, then written,
then read out loud and usually re-written following the careful listening to the read story by the
group. Through this process, each storyteller works to express the very ‘this-ness’, or haecceity,
of the remembered moment. Haecceity is integral to what Deleuze calls smooth space—the space that
escapes the over-coded striations of territorialized space. In Doing Collective Biography (2006),
we coined the term mo(ve)ment in order to evoke the doubled action involved in our collective
story-telling and writing, of dwelling in and on particular moments of being, and of movement
toward, or openness to, new possibilities both of seeing and of being. In telling, listening,
questioning, writing, reading and rewriting our stories, a shift takes place such that the memories
are no longer told and heard as just autobiographical (that mark one individualized person off from
the next), but as openings through which each subject’s specificity in its particularity and
sensory detail, becomes, the collectively imagined detail through which we know ourselves as human,
even as more human -- as humans-in-relation.


IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH DESIGN

Poststructural ethics requires the researcher to remain open to the not-yet-known, the
not-yet-understandable. Funding bodies and the apparatus of institutional ethics review are gripped
by a liberal-humanist desire for control that assumes that ethical practice will be guaranteed by
adherence to rules and prior modeling of the research process. They presume researchers are unable
to make ethical decisions without this surveillance. Such thinking is based on universal notions of
general human attributes and rights accompanied by assumptions of the irreducible alterity of the
other—that other being fragile, passive and in need of protection. Poststructural ethics in
contrast struggles toward a different kind of respect for the other, one which does not divide
researcher from researched, but comprehends their mutual embeddedness in discourse and relations of
power. The research cannot thus be totally planned in advance but maintains its openness to the
other, and to the ethical demands that arise in the encounter with the other, where the researcher
will become someone-she-was-not-already.


The research question is vital. It is theoretically well-grounded not just in the substantive
literature, but in the poststructuralist philosophy that may help to open up a completely new way
of envisaging what it is that might become known. Once again, however, it is vital that the
question itself be open to evolution through the research process, as the researcher, in relation
with her research subjects, comes to think differently about what it is possible to know.


Poststructuralist theorizing does not hold with positivist conventions that rely on method as a
guarantor of truth or “validity”. Truth arises, rather from engagement with the other, from the
particularity of events that the researcher is able to apprehend in relation to the other, from a
specific kind of listening to the other that stretches the ears of the listener, that requires the
listener to be open to becoming different and in that difference, to know the world differently
(Badiou, 2001; Nancy, 2007).


There are many methodological approaches to feminist poststructuralist research—since the emphasis
is on the process of exploration rather than the following of a method. Its instruments are not so
much instruments of measurement, but equipment in Heidegger’s sense (1993).  The equipments of
feminist poststructuralist research emerge through the research, becoming something other in their
use. Although we outline the steps we have taken in conducting a collective biography (Davies and
Gannon 2006), we emphasise that the equipment of collective biography will become something else
each time it is used.


Ideally all the participants in the collective biography workshop will work together on the
analysis of the stories to see in what way they can be used to generate new understandings desired
by or imagined within the originating research question. The ways in which the stories can be used
emerges both in the workshops and in the writing of the stories as well as in the writing of the
collaborative paper since writing too is a method of inquiry (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005).


STORIES FROM THE FIELD

The collective biography workshop that we draw on here was one where we set out to understand more
closely the implications of feminist poststructuralist theorizing for the meaning and experience of
“being a subject”. The poststructural subject-in-process that we invoke in collective biography
workshops is one who plays between a close and detailed observation of what she finds in her
memories and one who recognizes the constitutive force of that same moment of speaking/writing such
a description. The poststructural subject might be said to exist at the site of an almost
intolerable contradiction, a contradiction that is necessary to comprehend subjectification. Butler
says of this necessary ambivalence: “… the subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which
the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a
radically conditioned form of agency. A theory of the subject should take into account the full
ambivalence of the conditions of its operation” (Butler, 1997: 14-15).


In this particular workshop we reexamined the ‘break’ between humanism and poststructuralism, since
we had noted the persistence of humanist conceptions in our own thinking and writing, despite our
immersion in poststructuralist thought. During the workshop sessions we generated memories around
themes that had emerged from preliminary readings and discussions on the subject in
poststructuralist theory. We used these themes as triggers for memories of: ‘being someone’; ‘being
hailed as someone in a way that felt good’; ‘being mis-recognized’; and ‘changing’. They enabled us
to re-remember particular moments when we recognized ourselves (and others recognized us) as
particular selves, as unique and unitary individuals differentiated from others -- qualities that
we saw as productive of humanist subjects. In the workshop sessions we each told one or two
memories, in response to each trigger, to the group. We then wrote them, read them aloud and began
collectively interrogating the sorts of ‘selves’ we produced ourselves as in these memories. After
we had parted, analysis continued online as we typed up and annotated the final versions of our
memory stories. Finally, we took turns with the evolving draft of an analytical text using the
memories as data. We moved back and forth between personal and collective knowledge, between lived
experience and theoretical understanding, and between narrative and analytic texts as we continued
to struggle towards a paper to which we could all put our names.


While liberal humanism might read our stories as snapshots of progress towards a more or less
stable and self-contained personhood, reading through a feminist poststructuralist lens enables us
to read them as stories of (in)appropriate(d) femininity, providing instances of the ways in which
subjects are constituted as these particular (sexed) subjects, at these particular moments, in
these particular social contexts. We found as we wrote that though instability and slippage mark
poststructuralist analyses, they do not erase or displace the humanist analyses that are always
already there. The two memories analyzed below demonstrate our way of working with memory texts as
well as the precarious, tangled subjectivities we constructed within them.


My school report card had arrived. My parents silently read the comments written in neat careful
handwriting in each of the boxes. The report card was passed over to me to read. There was a
comment in relation to each school subject. Then at the bottom, in the 7 or so lines of overall
comments, the word ‘conscientious’ appeared. I’d never heard the word, or read it before. I
wondered what it meant. I asked, and when my mum told me, I thought it sounded good. I had my own
special word. I felt proud and important. I read it over and over to myself. I liked having that
word on my report card. I savoured the word, the sound of it, the speaking of it, the meaning of
it. There was no discussion about my coming first in the class. Then my father pointed out to me
that I shouldn’t think I was better than my big sister. She was in the B grade at her boarding
school solely because of subject preference. She wanted to study art. And dressmaking was useful
for a girl. She was coming near the top of her class, and she was excelling at tennis, which was
very pleasing to him. She might be chosen to represent her school. I felt shamed about feeling
proud, shamed that I was not good at tennis. But I liked that word, conscientious, its curious
spelling, the sound of it, the virtuous feeling of it. I went around saying it to myself over and
over.


This memory, generated in response to ‘being hailed as someone in a way that felt good’, can be
understood in a liberal humanist reading as indicative of developmental progress. A school
psychologist, for example, might conclude that the girl is emotionally well adjusted and from a
good family. She is succeeding at school and her parents take care to ensure that she is sensitive
to the needs and skills of other family members. The words on the page are taken as clues to the
(real) existence of the individual subject with a particular eye to her adjustment to the social
world and to any possible areas where her capacity to adjust might be flawed and in need of
remediation. From a poststructuralist perspective the story might be read in terms of the process
of subjection to the term conscientious: ‘Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where
existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in
order to be’ (Butler, 1997: 20). The child experiences herself as willingly embracing the term,
despite the lecture she receives from her father about not thinking she is better than her sister.
She can therefore be read as the resisting subject, as well as the desiring subject. She can also
be read as being taught by her father the precise and detailed embodiment of pleasure in her
achievement -- it will be quiet, not displaying itself as superior. She takes up these limitations
in the correct form of desire and attitude and bodily comportment in the dual act of being
recognized and recognizing herself. In order to be, she is vulnerable to the report-writing teacher
and the father. The story shows the process as both an imposition and an act of agency in which she
seeks out and lives the meaning of herself, her subjecthood, within the terms made available to
her. The girl did not first experience herself as conscientious and then learn the word for it. In
hearing herself described as such, her experience is constituted as such. She is constituted
(subjected) as conscientious and she actively takes up the constitution of herself inside the new
term that she understands as a desirable way of being. At the same time she reads herself as
already that kind of person.


In the second story, told in response to the prompt of ‘misrecognition’, a young teacher is called
into an undesired and abject naming by a student:


… She asked a question and looked across the hands thrust up into the air to Alex over by the
window, up to something, as usual. ‘Alex’, she said, calling him back to attention, ‘What do you
think of blah blah blah?’ Suddenly, Roslyn stood up in the centre of the room and shouted ‘You only
ask the boys questions,’ she said, ‘Because they’ve got penises.’ Everyone stared at her as she
stood at the front of the class, the tears in a burning rush up behind her eyes and her throat
choking. She wanted to say, ‘No, you’ve misunderstood.’ Or ‘No, that is the last thing I would want
to do.’ But she thought she would collapse, or explode, and she couldn’t speak through her horror
at these words. She turned and walked out of the classroom before they could see what they’d done
to her, she marched briskly up the path, heart thumping, feeling like she might throw up. She
marched straight into the staff toilets where she locked the door and sat on the seat and sobbed
and sobbed until the bell rang.


This story enters volatile terrain. The teacher sees herself as sensitive and responsive to the
needs of students, as professional and reason-able, as equitable. Yet, in her classroom practice,
she falls into an old gender trap where -- for diverse reasons -- teachers tend to interact more
with boys than with girls in classrooms. Although the teacher has the ‘power’ to select this
student (Alex) rather than that one (Roslyn) to participate in the discussion, her authority is
tenuous and depends on the more or less willing subjection of students to the disciplinary regimes
of the school and the classroom. Roslyn refuses this subjection and assumes authority in the class,
bodily by ‘standing up’ and ‘shouting’ into a space where she is not authorized to stand or speak,
discursively constituting the teacher as one who only attends to boys. The humanist question the
teacher might ask herself in that moment is ‘Am I really that person?’ and she struggles to do this
in the story by examining her conscience and her practice and beginning to rehearse answers to that
question. But it is not possible to answer from this unspeakable place. These students are  young
men and women. Roslyn’s accusation is that her excessive interest in the boys is because of their
male genitals. She cannot debate this rationally with Roslyn/the class. It is a dangerous moment,
as the violent reaction of her body reveals. In feminist poststructuralism, this embodied response
is as relevant as the words that are spoken in mapping the dynamic relations and effects of power.
In particular, poststructuralism questions the workings of relations of power – between the teacher
and Alex, between the teacher and Roslyn, between the rest of the class and these subjects -- and
how they are constituted in the moment-to-moment interactions of that intense social space.


Binary categories slip and slide through this story. The teacher reads Roslyn as ‘the students.’
Although only one student speaks, the teacher leaves the room ‘before they could see what they had
done to her.’ She positions herself in binary opposition to the whole class (whom she imagines
aligned with Roslyn, though they too may be stunned into silence). Another binary fracture exists
between the rational reflective teacher of her imagination and the sexist, capricious, even
lascivious, woman that Roslyn names her as. In this story, she is not willing in her subjection to
Roslyn’s conferral of this new subject position but she lacks the resources to resist it. She has
been favoring the boys. She is sexist in her practice, in effect if not in intention. And because
her way of ‘being’ has been named in that way, so too her way of thinking (about herself, her
practice, her students) is cast in that moment in terms of sex/gender rather than through any other
possible categories. The binary shifts from teacher/students, to women/men. ‘Woman’ entails the
(un)teacherly characteristics of emotionality and susceptibility to desire. But she is a woman as
well as a teacher, and, as in other spheres of her life, these multiple subject positions are in
delicate balance, fluid, and precariously achieved.


We could say much more about these stories but for now note that our analyses demonstrate the sorts
of issues and approaches we are interested in as feminist poststructuralist researchers. Using
lived experience as the ground for theorizing is central to feminist research, as is our particular
interest in examining discourses of sex/gender. Poststructuralism enables us to attend to processes
of subjectification and discursive regimes. In our analyses of the speaking subjects of these
stories, traces of the self-contained liberal humanist subject remain in some readings but our
subjects are called into existence in social spaces where power and knowledge circulate
unpredictably and where subjects are always tenuous, in process, vulnerable and prone to
decomposition.


SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Cambridge, UK:
Polity.

Elaborates sexual difference, materiality, embodiment and technology as it reworks feminism and
poststructuralism through a ‘cartography of becoming’.


Butler, J. (2004) Undoing gender. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.

Further develops theories of gender performativity and explores the consequences of undoing
normative conceptions of sex and gender. Gender is understood as reiterative, unstable, citational
and improvisational.


Davies, B. (2000) A Body of Writing. Walnut Creek CA: AltaMira Press.

An engagement with feminist poststructuralist theory that defies the boundary between theory and
embodied practice. Concepts of subjectivity, agency, feminism and power are elaborated through
vital depictions of life experience and empirical research.


Davies, B. (ed) (2007) Judith Butler in conversation: Analysing the texts and talk of everyday
life. New York: Routledge.

Implications of Butler’s theorizing are taken up in a range of interdisciplinary contexts that are
placed in conversation both with each other and with Butler herself. Notions of subjectivity,
performativity, desire, melancholia and intelligibility are worked through social sites including
kindergartens, theatre, academia and politics.


Davies, B. & Gannon, S (eds.) (2006). Doing collective biography: Investigating the production of
subjectivity. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press/ McGraw Hill.

Elaborates the methodology of collective biography and puts it to work in relation to
poststructural concepts including knowledge/ power and subjectivity.


Hyle, A., Ewing, M., Kaufman, J. & Montgomery, D. (eds) (2008) Dissecting the mundane:
International perspectives on memory-work. University Press of America. Demonstrates the breadth of
epistemological approaches to collective memory-work taken up by feminist researchers across
diverse disciplines and paradigms including poststructuralism.


Lather, P. (2007) Getting lost: Feminist Efforts toward a Double(d) Science. New York: SUNY Press.

Resituates and interrogates earlier articulations of poststructuralism and feminist praxis within a
context of paradigm proliferation and demands for ‘scientificity’ in educational and social
research.


Mazzei, L. & Jackson, A. Y. (eds.) (2009) Voice in qualitative inquiry: challenging conventional,
interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.

Aims to strain the notion of ‘voice’, and to push it to its limits, by deconstructing notions of
presence, authenticity and reflexivity. It exemplifies the methodological instabilities and the
transgressive possibilities of feminist poststructuralist approaches to research.


St Pierre, E.A. and Pillow, W. (eds) (2000) Working the Ruins. Feminist Poststructural Theory and
Methods in Education. New York: Routledge.

Demonstrates the creativity and breadth of research undertaken by feminist poststructuralist
educators.


Wilson, E. A. (2004) Psychosomatic. Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, Duke University
Press.

Shows the limiting effects of the prevailing tendencies in science and in feminist studies to
marginalize, and even to repudiate, the material body and the biological dimensions of the human
subject. It asks instead how science can contribute to contemporary accounts of embodiment in the
humanities and social sciences.


References not in Suggestions for further reading above

Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. (trans. P. Hallward) London:
Verso.

Butler, J. (1992) ‘Contingent foundations’, in J. Butler and Scott, J.W. (eds), Feminists theorize
the political. New York: Routledge. pp.3--21.

Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic life of power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cixous, H. and Derrida, J. (2001) Veils: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Davies, B. (2003) Shards of Glass. Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities. 2nd
edn. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. (1st edn, 1993.)

Davies, B. (2008). Re-thinking ‘behaviour’ in terms of positioning and the ethics of
responsibility. In A. M. Phelan & J. Sumsion (Eds.) Critical Readings in Teacher Education.
Provoking Absences (pp. 173-186) Sense Publishers: Netherlands.

Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, G. (2004) Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/knowledge. Brighton: The Harvester Press.

Heidegger, M. (1993) Basic Writings. 2nd edn., D. Farrell Krell (Ed.). New York: Harper Collins.

Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1998) Changing the subject:
Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. 2nd edn. London: Methuen. (1st edn, 1984.)

Kristeva, J. (1981) ‘Women’s time’, Tr. A. Jardine, Signs, 7(1): 13-35.

Nancy, J-L. (2007) Listening. (Trans. C. Mandell). New York: Fordham University Press.

St Pierre, E.A. (2000) ‘Post-structural feminism in education: An overview’, Qualitative Studies in
Education. 13(5): 477--515.

Richardson, L. and St. Pierre, E.A.(2005) Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.K. Denzin and Y. S.
Lincoln (Eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (3^rd edn.).  (pp 959-978) Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.