Robin Truth Goodman

Gender Work: Feminism after Neoliberalism

In prior chapters, I have pointed to elements of the current organization of capital that depend on expanding paradigms of “women’s work.” By “women’s work,” I mean a type of labor that in the industrial age was considered domestic, affective, immaterial, or reproductive, and having to do with functions of “care” and socialization. Designated as a “separate sphere” outside of production, such sets of productive tasks were, traditionally in the twentieth century, represented as outside of public concern, not organized by the wage, not protected by the rights and privacy discourse of the liberal state (e.g., labor, security, safety, health, environmental, educative, etc.), formulated as “autonomous,” and not connected to a package of guaranteed protections and benefits. Instead, they added “free time” to the productive process—time for which capital did not need to make an exchange, that in capital’s terms was separate: pure excess or “surplus” that capital got for free. Currently, capital is demanding that all work fit such paradigms.1

The New Taylorism: Hacking at the Philosophy of the University's End

This article looks at the critical writings of Mark C. Taylor. It suggests that Mark C. Taylor is rewriting a global imaginary devoid of the kind of citizenship that Henry Giroux claims as the basis for public education. Instead, Taylor wants to see the university take shape as profit-generating. According to Taylor, in lieu of learning to take positions in relation to the historical understanding that constitutes them, students are to be fitted into their identities as technology-users, directing their knowledge acquisition towards fulfilling contemporary corporate demand. This article places Taylors op-ed positions on universities in the context of his writings in his fields of specialization, philosophy and religion, to show how he has manipulated the key terms of critical theory against critical theorys emphasis on critique and citizenship. Taylor twists the ideas of Kant, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and the Frankfurt School to show how the market must be thought of as God.

Gender, Knowledge, and Economy: Greg Mortenson, Turning Schools into Stones

In April, 2011, the news hit the wires that Greg Mortenson, the author of the celebrated Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, had not described his adventures building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan with full accuracy. Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools are both feel-good memoirs that chronicle Greg Mortenson’s heroic travel exploits in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment to bring learning to Muslim girls. In a number of TV exposes and other mainstream outlets, including a dialogue with Jon Krakauer on Sixty Minutes followed by a book devoted to the topic entitled Three Cups of Deceit, Mortenson’s credibility was interrogated along with the legitimacy of the charity he founded to collect money for the school-building projects that the book describes— Central Asia Institute or CAI. Evidence had surfaced that his stay in the village of Korphe, and his promise to build a school there, did not directly follow from his failed attempt to climb the Himalayan mountain K2 in 1993 and getting lost on the descent as he had written, and he was not really kidnapped by the Taliban. Krakauer is explicit about the questionable accounting practices that Mortenson practiced and later claimed as but instances of a naive guy who suddenly and miraculously finds himself at the head of a large business enterprise. Not only did many of the members of the CAI charity’s Board of Trustees resign due to Mortenson’s inadequate reporting of expenses—for example, he was using expensive private jets to travel for speaking engagements—but also money that was collected from schoolchildren in the United States to pay for “teachers’ salaries, student scholarships, school supplies, basic operating expenses” (Krakauer, 41) was not spent in these designated ways.

Girls in School: The “Girls’ School” Genre at the New Frontier

In April, 2011, the news hit the wires that Greg Mortenson, the author of the celebrated Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools,had not described his adventures building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan with full accuracy. Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools are both feel-good memoirs that chronicle Greg Mortenson’s heroic travel exploits in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment to bring learning to Muslim girls. In a number of TV expose s and other mainstream outlets, including a dialogue with Jon Krakauer on Sixty Minutes,Mortenson’s credibility was interrogated: evidence had surfaced that his stay in the village of Korphe, and his promise to build a school there, did not directly follow from his failed attempt to climb the Himalayan mountain K2 in 1993 and getting lost on the descent as he had written, and he was not really kidnapped by the Taliban.1 Krakauer is explicit about the questionable accounting practices that Mortenson practiced and later claimed as but instances of a nai ve guy who suddenly and miraculously finds himself at the head of a large business enterprise, unawares. Not only did many of the members of the CAI charity’s Board of Trustees resign due to Mortenson’s inadequate reporting of expenses—for example, he was using expensive private jets to travel to speaking engagements—but also money that was collected from schoolchildren in the United States to pay for “teachers’ salaries, student scholarships, school supplies, basic operating expenses” (41) was not spent in these designated ways.

Feminist Theory and the Critique of Class

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, there was a vibrant debate within feminist scholarship in both the humanities and the social sciences about the relationship between Marxist theory and feminism. Following on Juliet Mitchell’s call in the late 1960s for a socialist criticism that took seriously “the subordination of women and the need for their liberation,”1 feminists tried to grapple with concepts like ideology, exchange, labor, and class struggle, and ask if and when they could be applied to oppressions in women’s social conditions, collected under the umbrella term of patriarchy, or if women’s forms of subordination were so culturally specific that they needed their own, independent rubric.2 Feminists also contested that the capitalist-proletariat relationship posed by Marx made class into a singular, overriding, and abstract concept for identity that wiped out both difference and experience. Heidi Hartmann, for example, famously reproves, “the categories of Marxism are sex-blind.”3 In about 1985, such inquiry lost its fervor.

Love My Rifle: What Schoolgirls Need and How the Army Can Give It to Them.

In 2008, the Florida state legislature, by a nearly unanimous vote, rushed passage on a statute that allowed sex segregation in public school classrooms. According to the version of the bill that passed through the Florida House, sex-segregated public school classrooms would be an expansion of school choice and would be implemented only voluntarily. The Florida bill follows a national trend, coming on the heels of a 2004 federal provision. Early in 2009 it was reported in the New York Times that 445 sex-segregated classrooms and 95 sex-segregated public schools have arisen nationwide for the purpose of solving ‘‘sagging test scores and behavioral problems.’’ This trend is happening despite a 1991 Supreme Court decision in Garrett v. Board of Educationwhere the court decided that single-sex classrooms violated the Fourteenth Amendment. That case, however, was in response to proposals to establish public schools for African American boys in Detroit in order to resolve ‘‘self-esteem’’ issues, and the girls’ parents combined with National Organization of Women (NOW) advocates filed the complaint, arguing that there was no evidence that single-sex classrooms The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 32:238–262, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2010.495252