GENDER AND TEXT IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

ALISON LEE University of Technology, Sydney

Introduction This paper addresses questions of feminist educational research from a viewpoint informed by recent poststructuralist work concerned with questions of discourse and language. Taking as its central problematic the question of gender, feminist theory has had a long-term engagement with issues of language and naming. Indeed, in recent time, feminist work has contributed a great deal to poststructuralist theories of language and subjectivity. Given this, it is surprising that more has not been made of these developments in feminist theory in gender and education research. In this paper, I discuss some methodological implications of the 'linguistic turn' in social theorising and research and consider what it might offer for a feminist project concerned with educational change.

Feminist research in education over the past twenty years, focused largely upon schools, has undoubtedly produced changes and better outcomes for girls. However, with some important exceptions, much of this work has remained within a broadly sociological framework which has constrained the kinds of knowledges and interventions that have been produced. It has become more and more apparent that the essentially liberal agenda of facilitating access for girls is only a beginning of the story of the effects of gender on social relations and the outcomes of schooling. Questions such as why girls make the subject-area choices they make in school and the training and employment choices they make after school are not readily reduced simply to questions of access. For example, in the case of the research project I will discuss briefly in this paper, girls are present as a minority in a Geography classroom which in no way overtly discriminates against them. Yet, I will argue, the complex processes of the insaitation of the curriculumwthe everyday operations of classroom talk, the discursive orientations of the textbooks, the distribution and movement of bodies in the classroom space, the assessment r6gimesmfunction to position'these girls

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as marginal to the curriculum project of constructing 'proper' geographical knowledge. At least, that is one story to be told about this classroom.

Some recent feminist educational work has begun to explore more complex theories of gender, power and subjectivity, and the attendant issues of congruent research methodologies, with respect to issues such as the above. This work includes Walkerdine (1984a, 1985), Lather (1991a, 1991b), Gore (1993), the contributors in Luke and Gore's (1992) anthology on critical pedagogy, McWilliam (1994), Kenway et al. (1994), Yates (1992), Davies, (1989, 1992), Threadgold (1993), Wright (1993). On the whole, this work is located within poststructuralist frameworks which acknowledge the productivity of language in the construction of meanings and gendered social identities. These writers are concerned to interrogate and interrupt the logics of patriarchal discursive norms, and to embark on a project of re-writing the story of schooling.

With the exception of the last three named writers, however, these feminist educators do not engage centrally with language as an analytic category. Threadgold and Wright, to whom I will return shortly, work within a (post)linguistic framework to specify modes of realisation of gendered effects in educational settings, while Davies has developed an analytics from a version of ethnomethodology to map the gendered construction of childhood. Specific developments which have taken place within the curriculum subject of English also offer something of an exception, where the actual content of the curriculum, together with the predispositions of many teachers and researchers, have produced a more or less explicit concern for matters of language and textuality. Feminist work in this field, then, has produced detailed accounts of the gendering of texts and readings which serve as an important base for further explorations of gender, language and subjectivity (Gilbert & Taylor 1991, Mellor & Patterson 1991). The problem with this, however, is that these questions have come to be seen as only, or principally, the concern of the teacher of English or literacy, thereby seriously constraining the implications of the 'linguistic turn' to one curriculum area. 1

There are important methodological considerations here. Poststructuralist critiques of structuralism point to the demise of 'grand narratives' of social relations such as those of labour and capital, class, race and gender, and to a consequent requirement to attend to questions of the local and specific. This is not a retreat to an a-social, a-political pluralism or individualism, however. Within poststructuralist theory, the individual and the social are mutually constitutive (Henriques et al 1984). The complex achievement of social relations and meanings occurs within specific sites, governed as much by local considerations as by larger structures of power. At the same time, however, a feminist political project, concerned with the problem of gender, must try to

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account for the ways in which gender power is maintained and reproduced, as well as resisted and transformed, within these local sites. For instance, in engaging with and against Foucault, many poststructuralist feminists are seeking ways of working with, and developing, a theory of power which is both relational and productive, not merely the exercise of domination but the necessary precondition for the establishment of social relations (McNay 1992, p. 67, Cooper 1994). For Foucault and those who use his work, a crucial characteristic of power, at least in theory, is that it is unstable and changeable, fluid and reversible. Power contains within it, as its necessary co-relation, resistance.

Theories of power such as these are produced not out of a search for a transcendent 'truth', but out of a politics which links theory ineluctably to praxis. The poststructural questions to ask of any theory of the social is not whether it is 'true' but what are its conditions of emergence and intelligibility and what are its effects. An important development in feminist poststructural research and theorising in education has been to produce accounts of the social practices of education which interrupt monolithic and determinist accounts of the workings of patriarchal power. This principle clearly establishes a research agenda of attention to micro-processes of social interaction, to establish what Donald (1985, p. 242) terms 'a sense of the daily struggle and muddle of education' and to avoid a too-neat analysis of power, along with the impression that 'the story is too pretty to be true' (Foucault 1980a, p. 209). It is important to find ways of investigating how sites such as school classrooms are more complex and contradictory than suggested by theories of 'reproduction', in their various generations, which 'assume a determinate or linear relation between the economy and schooling [and] which underplay it as a site of productivity in its own right' (Walkerdine 1984b, p. 196).

A feminist poststructuralist research agenda, then, is concerned with how gendered power relations and gendered subjectivities are produced in specific sites. It is concerned to account for the re-production of relations of gender oppression but also to look for discontinuities, incompletenesses, contradictions, differences, resistances, possibilities for transformation. The political project here is, as Kenway et al. (1994) put it, to find ways to 'make hope practical rather than despair convincing'. In developing a research methodology congruent with these theoretical and political principles, Lather calls for 'a more hesitant and partial scholarship capable of helping us to tell a better story in a world marked by the elusiveness with which it greets our efforts to know it' (Lather 1991 a, p. 15).

A central methodological problem with these theoretical developments, however, has been a lack of a theory of real isat ion--how it is that social meanings and relations of power are achieved, and how it is subjects are formed through discursive practices. Poststructuralist work takes the centrality of

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language as a given. But what does this mean? What might it be possible/necessary to say about the ways in which meanings are produced through language? In other words, what is needed to ground analysis is a theory and analytics of realisation which makes possible the specification of the micro- dynamics of linguistic production, in the construction of representations and the negotiation of social relations. For feminists, there is a danger that the central categories for analysis of gender power relations---domination, oppression, marginalisation--remain empty metaphors, 'exegetical clich6s (Sassoon 1987, p. 30) which fail to deliver a sufficiently complex account of meaning production to allow the called-for reinterpretation of women's and girls' experiences in specific sites. In much research carried out in the name of poststructuralism, there has been a tendency for the central categories of discourse and language to remain at a rather abstract and speculative level. In response, in my own work, I am concerned with questions of the linguistic processes through which gendered power relations are realised in specific sites, through close readings of the texts in circulation in those sites. In what follows, I will outline some of the ways in which I have attempted to deal with the issue of the linguistic realisation of discourses in textual practice in the case of one research project investigating the gender politics of the curriculum in school Geography.

Discourse and Text The term 'discourse' has, broadly, two distinct histories: one within European thought, within which Foucault's formulation of the term is located, and one within structuralist linguistics and semiotics. A discourse in Foucault's sense is a body of knowledge, not so much a matter of language as of discipline (McHoul & Grace 1993). For much of linguistics, on the other hand, discourse may be roughly synonymous with language, or text, understood as bounded instances of meaning. I will argue here that, while these scholarly traditions have little to do with each other, each is limited, without the other, in important ways. What is needed is a notion of text understood as textual practice and as linguistic realisation of discourses in the formation of subjects. To do this, I will briefly outline salient characteristics of the two senses of the term, before demonstrating what this might mean for the development of an analysis.

For Foucault, discourse is central to questions of power and government. He was concerned with the ways in which contemporary discourses and practices governing individuals were produced. Hence he traced 'genealogies' of particular discourses and practices in terms of the historical conditions of their production. A useful gloss on this sense of the term 'discourse' is provided by Fairclough:

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On the one hand, discourse is shaped and constrained by social structure in the widest sense and at all levels: by class and other social relations specific to particular institutions such as law or education, by systems of classification, by various norms and conventions of both a discursive and a non-discursive nature, and so forth .... On the other hand, discourse is socially constitutive .. . . Discourse contributes to the constitution of all those dimensions of social structure which directly or indirectly shape or constrain it: its own norms and conventions, as well as the relations, identities and institutions which lie behind them. Discourse is a practice not just of representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning (Fairclough 1992, p. 64).

Foucault worked with a notion of 'discipline' to account for the material effects of the discourses and practices of institutions, that is, the ways in which individuals' lives are regulated. According to Foucault (1980b, p. 39), 'disciplining' occurs 'at the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives'. Again: 'It is not enough just to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practices' (Foucault 1982, p. 250).

A discourse has the power to create reality by naming and giving meaning to aspects of experience from a particular perspective. This power to create is always a 'distributive' politics; that is, what is deemed to be 'real' and 'true' determines what is included and what is excluded, so that what cannot be named may not even be noticed (Foucault 1984). Foucault's refusal of the binary distinction between the material and the symbolic, the 'base' and the 'superstructure,' results in his formulation of the concept of power~knowledge, the simultaneous production of knowledge which is always bound up with historically specific r6gimes of power. Every social body produces its own truths, its own discourses which have a normalising and regulatory function (McNay 1992, p. 25). This does not only imply domination, however. Naming brings new categories into existence, which make possible new ways of both being in the world and of understanding it. Hence, counter-discourses may emerge, which name such things as 'patriarchy', thereby bringing into existence new relationships, new possibilities for transformation and reconstruction.

In contrast, in linguistics, 'discourse' has traditionally been taken as being synonymous with 'text', or, more precisely, the supra-sentential 'level' of language. Discourse analysis is textual analysis, mostly concerned with patterns of interaction in spoken language (most notably in an educational context,

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Sinclair & Coulthard 1975). The text is a bounded instance of meaning which has sometimes been theorised in relation to a broader social context (in the traditions of systemic functional linguistics [Halliday 1978] and ethnography of communication [Hymes 1974]), but more often not. Other linguistic uses of the term include notions of text structure, or cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1985, Martin 1993) and even, I would argue, register (Wignell, Martin & Eggins 1993). There is also a slippage to be observed, within recent work in linguistics, between a historical use of the term 'discourse' to mean a coherent treatise (for example, The Discourse on Reason) and more mainstream linguistic usage (Lee 1993, 1995/in press). Used in any of these ways, the term has little to do with Foucault's analysis of the relationship between institutions and power in the delineation and policing of particular ways of producing knowledge and subjects.

Nevertheless, what various forms of socially oriented linguistic analysis do have to offer is a 'toolkit' for attending to the minutiae of the mechanisms of social interaction and meaning production. This work has in the past often been focused on language use central to the instantiation of curriculum, and has included work on linguistic variation (drawing on Labov 1969); work in sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology on linguistic-structural patterns of realisation of classroom interactions and relationships (Mehan 1979, Sinclair & Coulthard 1975, Cazden 1988, Green 1983, Gumperz 1981, Heath 1983); and more recent work within systemic linguistics in Australia describing the linguistic and structural features of genres of written English (Christie and Rothery 1989).

The groundedness of this kind of linguistic analysis ought to be highly relevant to research within poststructural frameworks, where there has often been little attention paid to the mechanisms for the realisation of discourses in language (Brown & Cousins 1980). There is a strong case to be made that there need to be tools for attending to how certain kinds of effects are achieved in specific sites in the everyday performance of the tasks generic to that site. For feminist researchers, for example, it has been well established that certain gendered interactional patterns persist across a multitude of sites (Maltz & Borker 1982). Within a framework which acknowledges the salience of language in the constitution of social structures and relations, it becomes necessary to assemble a toolkit which will trace the specificity of the ways in which these patterns are achieved. For poststructuralism, the power to create reality is realised through discursive practices of naming, which involve not just that which is namedbut how and by whom. Linguistic analysis which might produce accounts of at least the two latter matters has, I would argue, an important role to play in current research.

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A major problem with linguistics, however, even the most generative forms of text-based analytics, is that it has not, generally speaking, engaged contemporary forms of social theory (Williams 1992). Linguistics, the originary structuralist enterprise, proceeds methodologically as a science, constructing elaborate technical apparatuses for the analysis of words, sentences and texts. Analysis of linguistic diversity, for example, largely proceeds from a liberal- pluralist theory of 'different-but-equal'. It is in this context that Maltz and Borker produce their accounts of gender differences in terms of 'miscommunication'. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, in its various manifestations, has mounted a trenchant critique of logocentric accounts of language and of the project of modernist science more generally. As a consequence, poststructuralist theorists have generally wanted to have little to do with linguistics and, as Poynton (t993) has noted, the one enterprise has by and large proceeded without taking account of the principles and procedures of the other.

The most significant exceptions to this for educational research are the overlapping traditions of 'critical linguistics' (particularly the work of Fairclough 1989, 1992) and 'social semiotics' (particularly the work of the feminist writers Threadgold 1988, t994, Wright 1993, Poynton 1985, 1990, but also Kress 1985 and Hodge & Kress 1988, Kress & van Leeuwen 1990, Lemke, t990). Within these traditions, where much of the work explicitly addresses educational issues, theorists and researchers have worked within the tensions and incommensurabilities evident between the structuralist and poststructuralist projects. They have done this in order to address the problem usefully formulated by McHoul and Luke, when they call for:

discourse analyses which embrace the strongest features of both traditions [that is, the linguistic and the poststructural] by being theoretically informed and critical, engaged with specific social and political issues, while also being analytically precise and grounded in actual materials (McHoul and Luke 1989, p. 325).

Approaches to discourse analysis which proceed in the name of social semiotics, or feminist 'post-linguistics', seek to produce readings of texts which indicate the ways individuals are positioned and take up positions within discourses and thus come to constitute themselves as subjects of those discourses. They are thus centrally concerned with the dynamics, or what Foucault termed the 'microphysics', of social relations, as these are realised in and through texts. It is important to realise that, as Walkerdine (1990, p. 108) points out, 'discourse analysis' in a Foucauldian sense is not simply a method of analysing texts, but a 'whole theory of (post) modern forms of government'. On the other hand,

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however, language produces many of the most powerful technologies for the production of the r6gimes of truth within which individual subjects are positioned. Questions such as how language practices position subjects within r6gimes of truth and how individuals come to take up, more or less non- coercively, particular subject positions, and thus to produce themselves and the world through language, come to light as important research questions.

In this sense, Fairclough's (1992) description of his work as 'textually oriented discourse analysis' is helpful in locating a space where social processes might be investigated in terms of the textual realisation of discursive/disciplinary politics in operation in specific sites. In my own work, perhaps provisionally fixable here as a textually oriented feminist discourse analysis, key questions to consider are: what is at stake for differently gendered students in negotiating a trajectory through a curriculum?; how might that process be traced?

Gender and School Geography Within poststructural theory, the refusal of the unified subject of humanism sees identities as constantly in process, in what Angelides (1994) terms the process of 'subject(act)ivity' or 'identity-work' (Green & Lee 1994). In terms of gender, this means taking on a notion of a constant (and always incomplete and imperfect) process of engendering, available to be partially read through discursive and bodily practices. Drawing on Foucault's later work on practices of the self, Judith Butler produces this formulation:

Gender is not traceable to a definable origin because it itself is an originating activity incessantly taking place. No longer understood as a product of cultural and psychic relations long past, gender is a contemporary way of organising past and future cultural norms, a way of situating oneself in and through those norms, an active style of living one's body in the world (Butler 1987, p. 131).

In the light of this, my research task can be re-formulated as a search to find ways of describing this process of engendering in a specific curricular site. 2 In this section I want to outline briefly some methodological implications of the above discussion for my own research into literacy and the gender politics of curriculum. In the project which I will draw on here (Lee 1995/in press), my concern was to trace processes of gendered subject production through the ongoing negotiation of the curriculum. That is, while curriculum work can be understood as the provision of a training in subject-disciplinary knowledge, part of its effects are to project and produce particular forms of student identity. These

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forms of identity are tied up with other major identity formations such as gender and with broader social power dynamics. The dynamic nature of this process can be captured in the term 'identity-work'.

In what follows, in keeping with the process I want to discuss, I will present a fragment of a text, demonstrating very briefly some of the analytic methods I have considered appropriate for the study, and then go on to discuss what this means for a feminist 'post linguistics' in educational research. In the case I explore here, I was concerned in my analysis to address the following questions: first, in terms of the micro-logics of realisation, what are the processes by which individuals are positioned through speech practices within the classroom?; how is engendering happening?; how can the struggle to achieve a coherent (gendered) subjectivity be represented? Second, by focusing on the actual discourses being mobilised, a closer engagement of the productivity of language may be achieved; the questions that can be thus addressed are: in what ways does the production of geographical meanings in classroom talk impinge on the positioning of students within larger difference dynamics such as gender?; in what ways, conversely, does gender impinge on the production of particular kinds of geographical meanings?

Here, then, is a 'text'. I have selected a fragment from the indefinite array of semiosis in the classroom, bounded and framed it, thereby producing a beginning, an end and a shape. This 'text' is an artefact of this process. The central question to address here is not a simple 'what does this text mean?' but rather, how can it mean? That is, what are its conditions of intelligibility? To address this question I will produce some brief points of micro-textual analysis and then consider the larger discursive framework within which this text is located.

Some preliminary points of contextualisation are necessary. A class of Year 11 students and their teacher, Alex D, are generating a definition of the term 'resource', which Alex D is documenting on the blackboard. The students are in their final unit of the Geography curriculum for the year, their first year in a new subject-discipline. I have been in this classroom as a field researcher for four months. I have selected this text for its illustrative value of a number of discursive and interactive features which marked this classroom for me, as a researcher, during my project of investigation into the gender politics of literacy and curriculum in school Geography. I read it as symptomatic of some key features of this gendered space, which I want to consider more closely.

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'Resources population and pollution' discussion

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19

20 21

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Andrew: You have to say what a resource is. You have to say it's useful; it's a natural product. Katherine: What's natural? Andrew: That comes from the earth. Katherine: But you have to tie everything together. To see how each one relates to the other, how they affect the product and um, the uses we get from the product. Andrew: 'Useful commodities!' Alex D: Oh right, that's good. Useful commodities. That sounds good. Are you happy with that? Katherine: Being natural .... Alex D: Yes, both natural and ... Andrew: Man-made. Katherine: Artificial. Alex D: Do you mind if we say human? That means made by all people. Andrew: They might be things or, you know ... concepts. Alex D: Things or ideas. Or techniques. They might be a way of doing something. Andrew: You should put in an example there. Like, you know, eg ... like iron or ideas ... eg technology. Alex D: Right, we're getting somewhere. I think we've missed a bit of what Katherine was saying a little while ago. She said something about use. What about use? Robert . 'Human consumption'. Human use. Alex D: Use for what though? Andrew: For a more technological society. Alex D: To maintain our living standard? Is that a way of putting it? What.did you say Katherine? How did you put it? Katherine: To maintain a balance and ... Alex D: Yes ... I think you're a bit further down the track than we are at this point ... Katherine: Like the natural things and the human things tie in together, like to benefit ... depending on how we treat them. Alex D: (writing on board): They can be combined to produce goods and services. As Andrew says, we haven't really gone into what is renewable or non-renewable, but perhaps that isn't really necessary at this point of the definition.

Structures and processes of spoken interaction, such as turn-taking and topic choice, are categories of central interest to sociolinguistics. There is a certain

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amount of information to be gleaned through simple close attention to the realisation of these features in a text, without recourse to an elaborate technical apparatus. It is easy to see, for example, that Katherine is the only girl attempting to play a part in this discussion; further, that Andrew is afforded a position of some authority by Alex D. In Turns 6 and 19, Alex D asks Andrew for confirmation of wording: Are you happy with that ? Is that a way o f putting it? He affirms Andrew's utterances: As Andrew says: ... (Turn 23).

In the light of this, it is noteworthy that the first move by Alex D is also an obvious endorsement of Andrew's pronouncement in Turn 5 of 'useful commodi t ies! ' since, until then, the discussion has been a dialogue between Andrew and Katherine. His choice to reward the flat pronouncement of a technical term from economics by Andrew clearly overlooks the content as well as the fact of Katherine's extended contribution in Turn 4. Katherine's language is much more elaborated than Andrew's. It is largely exploratory and reads as a struggle to relate some general principles of cause-and-effect relations to the specific topic of resources being constructed. It is also, despite the exploratory nature, the language of argument, in the sense of making a case, in contrast to Andrew's assertion of a technical term which stands for a proposition. By repeating Andrew's Useful commodities and amplifying approvalmOh right, that's good ... That sounds g o o d m A l e x D successfully directs the discussion from the board, away from Katherine's concerns and towards a framing of resources as commodities.

It can be noted that Katherine's moves are thwarted in other ways. Despite Alex D's attempt to bring her back into the discussion at Turn 15, she does not succeed until Turn 20, where she is further interrupted by Alex D. This interruption both affirms her (Yes) but defers her concerns: I think you're a bit further down the track than we are at this point . . . . This move of Alex D's might be read as a classic pedagogical strategy for acknowledging a contribution while managing and containing difference. But whose difference? A close reading reveals telling relations of inclusion and exclusion; the pronoun you is juxtaposed against we (the teacher and the rest of the class). In this way, Katherine becomes identified with her utterance and marked off from the rest of the group.

A more technical analysis can even more precisely mark some of the ways in which participants are positioning themselves and being positioned through the enactment of this moment of curriculum. For instance, Andrew is claiming a space as a 'primary knower' and director of the discussion: You have to say what a resource is ... (Turn 1). The term, primary knower', or 'k l ' , comes from the exchange structure approach to conversation analysis (Berry 1981) and can be defined as the person who authoritatively controls the information being exchanged. As already indicated, Andrew is afforded the kl position quite

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readily, it seems, by Alex D. Katherine's question in Turn 2, What's natural? might readily be interpreted as a challenge to Andrew's k l status, a challenge, that is, to the givenness of the term 'natural', a challenge to his premises. However, Andrew's reply, That comes from the earth, indicates that he reads her question as a request for information, which he supplies, thereby preserving his k l position in the interaction. This has been noted as a classic gendered conversational strategy (Maltz & Borker 1982).

There is much more that a linguistic analysis might offer for a gendered reading of this text. However, a great deal that is going on in this text cannot be gleaned from such forms of analysis. Texts exist in a complex and dynamic relationship within contexts. While the systemic functional model of linguistic analysis, of particular significance in educational research in Australia at present, does attempt to theorise the relationship between text and context, drawing on the anthropological work of Malinowski, in practice, the empirical methods for construing context are confined to language itself and there is little evidence of a rigorous theoretical engagement with ethnographic or archival methods for establishing meanings for particular texts.

Poststructuralist analysis proceeds from the principle that contexts have no stable identity and that text/context relations are dynamic and undecidable (Green & Lee 1994, p. 217). The teacher and students in this text are 'doing Geography'. If the question 'what is Geography?' were asked, however, there is no single answer to be had. Hence, it is necessary to move beyond this text to interrogate the discursive universe of Geography, of which this curriculum moment is an instance. Following Foucault (1972), disciplines can be theorised as a bundle of different discourses meeting and competing for dominance in particular institutional sites. Readings in the history of Geography reveal telling shifts and ruptures, with recent feminist developments challenging the very 'foundations' of the discipline (Rose 1993). Similarly, the historical emergence of school subjects over time rewards study in terms of situating contemporary curriculum as institutional struggles over meanings and resources (Goodson 1983, 1988). In Western Australia, the state in which my research was carried out, for example, the following excerpt from a curriculum history is illustrative:

The concerns by geography teachers were eventually taken up by the Joint Geography Syllabus Committee after intensive lobbying by prominent geography educators and academics. [...] The academics on the subcommittee seized the opportunity to reorient the geographical paradigms included in the earlier curriculum. An ecological approach to geography was advocated most strenuously to replace the Man-Land perspective (Marsh 1987, p. 198).

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In an attempt to generate as 'thick' as possible a sense of 'context', I embarked on a process of ethnographic and archival mapping of the curriculum. This process produced the curriculum as an assemblage of texts of three main kinds. The first were written texts engaging 'Geography' as a subject/discipline: disciplinary debates, curriculum history accounts, parallel and complementary research, syllabus documents, textbooks and class notes, student writings. The second were interviews with academics, teachers, curriculum writers, examiners, students. The third were the field notes produced during my time in the classroom. These texts were read against each other, with parallels and homologies as well as inconsistencies and contradictions being noted.

Through this process, the Geography classroom of my study emerged as a site at the intersection of a number of discursive r6gimes, some dominant, others marginal. Of particular note here was a recurring binary split between two major subdomains of the discipline: physical Geography and human Geographies, which was gendered in a number of significant ways, not least being at the level of 'choice' of orientation by men and women as professional geographers, academics, teachers and students. A further binary operated at the level of discourses in circulation as major explanatory frames for geographical phenomena: those of economics and bio-philosophy. These are also gendered masculine/feminine in terms of discursive orientations of participants in different sites. In the curriculum of my study, there was a heavy emphasis on physical geographies and on economistic explanatory frameworks, both in the syllabus and in the textbooks and class notes. These points, of course, necessarily constitute something of an oversimplification of a complex picture which is extensively documented in the larger study (Lee, 1995/in press).

In the text reproduced above, for example, Katherine and Andrew appear to be pursuing quite different discursive directions. Andrew constructs an account of the topic of 'resources' largely in terms of a capitalist geographical enterprise, producing quite early on (in Turn 5) the formulaic 'useful commodities' as a kind of summary/appropriation/transformation of Katherine's extended attempt at explanation in Turn 4. Katherine, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the notion of 'resource' in terms of a bio-philosophical discourse. She pursues themes of balance and interrelationship throughout the text, beginning with her But you have to tie everything together in Turn 4. Andrew goes on to construe resources as commodities, in terms of their uses for a more technological society (Turn 18). He elaborates his notion of commodity to include material and mental goodsmthey might be things or, you know ... concepts (Turn 12). In his provision of examples (Turn 14), Andrew makes it clear that both 'exterior' and 'interior' commodities (iron or ideas) count as technological in this construction.

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Resources as commodities are, by definition, available for human 'use' in an instrumental sense.

Katherine, in contrast, ties her notion of 'use' to her theme of balance. Thus, 'use' is linked to 'effect' in Turn 4: But you have to tie everything together. To see how each one relates to the other, how they affect the product and um, the uses we get from the product. This view sees the natural things and the human things in a dynamic relationship which is not necessarily oppositional; mutual benefit is possible, depending on how we treat them (Turn 22, my emphasis).

Within the terms of this text, Katherine's discursive construction of resources is 'written-out' of the definition process. In Turn 23, Alex D moves to close this section of the discussion by appropriating her speaking position for his own. He does this by rewriting her formulation of a bio-philosophical principle (in Turn 22) into the discourse of techno-economics, in order to complete the sequence he has been constructing with the two boys. It is worth placing these two Turns together, in order to plot the process at work.

22

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Katherine: Like the natural things and the human things tie in together, like to benefit ... depending on how we treat them. Alex D: (writing on board): They can be combined to produce goods and services.

In this move, tie in is translated as be combined while to benefit becomes to produce goods and services. As with Andrew in Turns 13 and 19, Alex D appears to be prompting Katherine, 'putting words into her mouth'. In this case, though, there is a clear sense of discursive non-correspondence in the translation. Indeed, the omission of Katherine's last clausemdepending on how we treat themni 's the final writing-out of her concern with mutuality and responsibility. Closure is thus provisionally achieved in the discussion at this point, in the apparent incorporation of Katherine's position into the dominant one.

Within the frame of this bounded text, it is difficult to read Katherine's positioning as other than one of being silenced, marginalised, written-out of the construction of geographical knowledge. Within the larger context of the aggregated texts of the curriculum, however, other dynamics are in operation. These may be seen particularly clearly in a further set of binaries which organise the realisation of curriculum in this classroom: those of speech/silence and speech/writing. One enduring phenomenon of this classroom was that boys talked while girls wrote. This in itself is not particularly worthy of note; the comparatively greater investment of girls in written textuality in schools is well documented (for example, White 1991). What is interesting in the case of

G E N D E R AND TEXT IN E D U C A T I O N A L RESEARCH 39

Katherine, however, is the function of writing in her negotiation of the curriculum.

Elsewhere I have argued that the girls' greater attention to writing could be in part construed as their retreat, as embodied subjects in the classroom, into a semiotic space which was relatively safe from the extrusive and intrusive speech practices of boys in the classroom (Lee 1995/in press). That is, writing could be construed as a relatively private activity, in contrast with speaking, where positions could be taken up and elaborated without being closed off in the interests of producing the singular account of a topic necessary for curricular coherence. Given that particular discourses were privileged in class discussion, while others were marginalised and deferred, the only place for the articulating of positions from the vantage point of alternative discourses was in writing. Far from being only an obedient 'giving back' of a neutral body of transmitted content, writing can thus be understood as opening a space where girls could locate and articulate difference. This is clearly not an unproblematic space, within some simple notion of the 'private', but rather a complex, multiple space, to be read in part in relation to the 'public' domain of the classroom and in part in relation to the 'public' domain of disciplinary-curricular knowledge as it is inscribed in the assessment r6gime of the Geography examination.

There is more to be said about the functions of writing, however. For Katherine, in interview, writing was construed as a way of knowing, whereas for boys, it was more often regarded as a display of knowledge. What is remarkable in Katherine's corpus of writing over the year in Geography was the consistency with which certain motifs recurred and were elaborated: motifs such as balance, responsibility, mutuality. A reading of this corpus in terms of ' identity-work'-- an ongoing investment in the exploration and articulation of particular discursive positioningsmallows a repositioning of the relationship between student-subject and the curriculum. It may indeed be necessary here to de-privilege the curriculum over the student-subject, and to posit Geography as merely as one discursive resource for a project of self-formation which is always extra to and 'other' than the position proffered to a student such as Katherine through curriculum itself. Indeed, the curriculum of Geography may be almost irrelevant to Katherine in the larger scheme of things. Katherine, positioned as a young woman as a subject within a multitude of different discourses, only some of which are the discourses of school knowledges, engages actively in a project of self-production, which intersects fleetingly with the curriculum of Year 11 Geography.

One persuasive way to read the 'resources' text is in terms of this excess of signification. Although I have produced closure through the framing of this text, as the curriculum is realised in time, of course, the moment moves on and closure

40 LEE

is never complete. I have likened the classroom talk to a play by Harold Pinter, where often two parallel monologues are presented, articulated from within very differently construed discursive spaces, and indicating two non-intersecting sets of concerns and understandings about the way things are. This reading is a quite dramatic representation (as indeed Pinter's texts can be) of gender differences in social interactions in terms of relentless trajectories of non-correspondence. To this reading, though, must be added the operations of power. Discursive heterogeneity, plurality and non-correspondence operate within a regime of power which produces a dominant version of geographical knowledge and, as its necessary co-relation, resistant counter-versions.

Conclusion This paper presents an account of a textually oriented feminist discourse analysis, drawing on a study of the gender politics of school Geography. I have argued for a necessary coming-together of the two projects of linguistic micro-analysis and a broader, richly contextualised analysis of the workings of the discourses of Geography in a specific site. Through attention to questions of realisation--here, the micro-processes of classroom interactionma 'better story' might be told of gender power relations. Here, rather than 'exegetical cliches' of domination and exclusion, is one account of the realisation of gendered power in the negotiation of meanings, in terms of conversational structures and strategies as they intersect with the mobilisation of dominant and marginalised discourses in the curriculum. This is not, of course, to claim a 'transcendent' status for a methodology of discourse analysis. The readings do not claim to 'tell the truth' about texts and sites. Indeed, the readings presented here must, like any poststructuralist project, be interrogated for their claims to truth, and viewed with a necessary suspicion (Lather 1991b, Yates 1992).

It should be noted here that an analysis of the gender politics of discourse drawing substantially on the work of Foucault and of feminists working within Foucaultian frameworks does not lead to simple theories of gendered conspiracy, nor necessarily to the reverse sexism that characterises some feminist educational projects. For instance, Alex D can be read as bringing about a particular discursive construction of geographical knowledge in conjunction with, and by means of, the development of a classroom culture of informal solidarity with the boys in the class, which functioned to exclude Katherine's concerns in the example discussed here. However, he is not represented as simply an independent 'author' of this process. Rather, as teacher and as geographer, he is a 'dispenser' of institutional power (Foucault 1980c). He speaks for, and is spoken by, the larger systems in operation here.

G E N D E R AND TEXT IN E D U C A T I O N A L R E S E A R C H 41

A feminist discourse analysis is not the development of specifically feminist methods of analysis but, rather, the strategic appropriation of existing methods in the service of exposing the gender politics of discourse. Linguistic analysis by itself is necessarily reductive; in this case it might produce an apparently over- deterministic account of relations of domination and exclusion. Nevertheless, what is not made explicit cannot easily be contested. In the larger study of the Geography curriculum, the close-grained analysis of the texts of the curriculum produced a complex picture, where the achievement of masculine privilege was not seamless or uncontradictory. In the fragment of that data presented here, it is the specification of gendered speech strategies, in conjunction with an exposure of the workings of the discourses in circulation within the subject-discipline of Geography, that allows space for contestation. This paper has argued the need for a 'post-linguistic' textual analytics which attends to the linguistic realisation of discourses in textual practice. Such an analytics of the practice and politics of realisation might contribute to both a re-imagining and a. strengthening of the feminist project for educational change.

Notes A related problem is that the category 'literacy' itself has frequently also been confined in this way to the concerns of primary language education and subject English, rather than being seen as a terms centrally connected to the production of curriculum knowledge. For detailed discussion of this point, see Green (1993) and Lee (1995/forthcoming) The question of the body is crucial to the work of Butler and other feminist theorists, as indeed it is to feminist concerns with gender relations in the enactment of curriculum in classrooms, though it is not a focus of this paper.

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