Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

648 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
GENDER AND NEOLIBERALISM
There is something very powerful about current shifts in gendered imagery, even if these images
are spurious. Current economic conditions seem to have detached processes of feminization from
women, to extend them to men as well. So now men suffer conditions of part-time, casualised, and
low-paid labor that were formerly associated only with women. The very notion of a continuous
“career” that unfolds with one’s own unique developmental trajectory as the apotheosis of cultural
masculinity under modernity has suffered irreparable change. Within the public eye men now
figure within public and mental health targets, as sufferers of undiagnosed depressions and as
potential candidates for suicide or self-harm. In my locality (Manchester, UK) there are now
special internet counselling services (such as CALM—the Campaign Against Living Miserably)
specifically set up to address young white men who are considered likely to feel unable to access
suitable support services in part because doing so would transgress their—now maladaptive—
gender norms.
The current cultural preoccupation with men as vulnerable, rather than hegemonic, not only coincides
with other narcissistic insults to the modern gendered arrangement of man-as-breadwinner,
but also with broader curtailments of the grandiosity of Western expansionism (the current invasion
and occupation of Iraq being a reactive overcompensation for, rather than contradiction of,
this). Androgyny, hailed since the 1970s as mentally healthy, now fits the flexibility required of
the new world order.
It is in this context that a new model of the human subject could be said to have emerged. This
model, recalls Steedman’s (1995) discussion, in that it is gendered as female. But, as with her
account, its very femininity does some significant additional work not possible with a culturally
masculine model. A cultural example comes to mind as an illustration. The film Amelie (dir. J. P.
Jeanet, France 2001) concerns a gamine young woman who finds gratification in helping others,
and in so doing finds love. This film was a huge success (generating a uniform wave of “it’s lovely”
responses even from monolingual Anglophone audiences usually resistant to reading subtitles)
and has been said to have revitalized the French film industry. Yet notwithstanding her good
intentions (and how “good” are they really? For the film does interrogate her motivations...),
she can be seen to impose developmental agendas upon the recipients of her good deeds, rather
than engaging in consultation with them about what it is that they want (the blind man and the
Moroccan men being significant examples here). This is exactly the problem of development
policy and practice—whereby the beneficiaries are required to tailor their needs and desires to
the agendas of their benefactors (and usually they have to pay for it too in loan guarantees and
interest rates). Yet this recapitulation of old imperialist themes within the film’s narrative escapes
notice precisely because it is performed by a lovely, vulnerable young woman, whose neediness
and beauty seductively distract us from this.
Are we now witnessing a feminisation of the neoliberal subject who can better realise traditional
globalizing aims? Do shifts in models of gender indicate genuine changes in gendered power
relations, or are they merely surface displacements whose novel aspects obscure the continuity
of preexisting agendas? Jenson and Saint-Martin (2002) in their cross-national analysis of shifts
in social policy, claim to have identified a new model of the subject that they call LEGO TM
after the children’s educational building blocks. This new social policy takes education and
development as the key route to economic prosperity, aiming to maximize individual productivity
through participation within the paid-labor force. Like the children’s toy its key tenets focus,
firstly, on “learning through play” (as a self-motivated, nongoal directed activity), with play
becoming a practice that can become instrumentalized into a form of legitimized “work” through
a commitment to “lifelong learning.” Secondly, there is a future orientation to this approach,
emphasizing activation of human potential for later benefit as the mode of social inclusion and