Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

The concept of the culture of critical discourse was deployed by Gouldner to refer to a historically evolved set of linguistic rules associated with the rise of the ‘new class’ of intellectuals and technical intelligentsia—such as educators—in the early twentieth century. Justification is the sine qua non to these linguistic rules in that assertions must be justified by appeal to reason—particularly scientific—and not to traditional authority, such as patriarchy or class. Public education, Gouldner argued, was the key site for the production of the culture of critical discourse,³³ and as girls and women gained access to schools and colleges, they were seen to have opportunities to acquire the tools for challenging traditional gender expectations.

Mackinnon³⁴ suggested that the notion of the culture of critical discourse is ‘a helpful strand in charting changes in women’s identity’, as it represents an alternative to the pessimistic view that educational institutions merely reproduce existing social mores and structures. Nevertheless, she cautioned that the concept is flawed as it is deeply gendered and is based on the masculine subject and perspective as being universal. Furthermore, since science itself is arguably ‘dense with gendered assumptions’,³⁵ to rely on it as an alternative source of authority can be problematic for women.³⁶

An additional problem with Gouldner’s thesis is that it posited a unified subject who is capable of transferring the critical discourse to contexts other than the educational site in which it was nourished. He argued that these ‘school-inculcated modes of speech are, also, (relatively) situation-free language variants’.³⁷ The rational autonomous being at the core of this proposition is, according to poststructuralist revisions of the notion of the subject, a fiction produced by humanist theorising of identity and consciousness. As an alternative to this essentialist depiction of the subject, poststructuralism suggests a ‘decentred’ subjectivity produced through multiple, and sometimes contradictory, discourses.³⁸ In consequence, subjectivity is fluid and open to change as discourses ‘coexist and have mutual effects and…meanings are multiple’, thus producing choice, ‘though it may not be simple or conscious’.³⁹