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Reflexive Texts

Issues of Knowledge, Power, and Discourse in Researching Gender and Learning

St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Canada

Catherine J. Irving

Coady International Institute

This article provides a feminist poststructural analysis of the authors' academic labor during a State of the Field Literature Review of Gender and Adult Learning for a government-funded educational body. Drawing on Foucault and feminist theorists, the authors pay particular attention to how power seeps down through the system to our bodies in our reading, writing, and analyzing tasks. Using a critically reflexive framework, the authors first examine how government's establishment of knowledge centers and committees, as well as calls for proposals, and work as technologies of power to produce effects such as resistances. Then, attention is turned to their position as feminist researchers who have an ambivalent relationship to some of the field's record on gender and learning. In so doing, the authors interrupt the binary of good researchers/bad government and identify themselves as simultaneously complicit and resistant.

Key Words: poststructuralism • feminism • literature review • adult education • gender • discourse analysis • reflexivity

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