Powerful Subjects: Are Women Really Taking over the University?

Universities have traditionally been spaces where men are constituted as powerful subjects and where they define what is worth knowing. Now that women students are emerging as the new majority, are they threatening to wrest this power from men, and are men fighting back? This is the first book to explore the emerging female face of higher education, charting women's new position as the 'normal' student and the fear and resistance this has provoked. Feminists dreamed of transforming the malestream curriculum and culture in universities, precipitating a radical upheaval of what can and should be known, and the book examines how far this has been achieved. Qualitative research with women students of diverse backgrounds in the UK and with women academics internationally reveals the interplay between women's power, or lack of it, in the university and the world outside. Lively, innovative and multi-dimensional, Powerful Subjects probes questions of gender, generation, class, misogyny and racism, drawing on multiple theories to push at the boundaries of educational research. It will excite the general reader, plus students, policy makers, educational researchers and those interested in feminist ideas. Book jacket.

Jocey Quinn is Research Fellow in the Institute of Access Studies, Staffordshire University.