| Abstract: | This paper speaks to two articles that have been published in Gender and Education . The first, and most obvious, is that of Tett (2000). Lynn Tett's paper is concerned with an analysis of community activists 'returning' to education. I offer a complementary reading of Tett (2000) in the hope of illustrating the saliency of postcolonial perspectives for developing theorisation in the field of 'women returners'. I do this by drawing on the metaphors of 'exile' (Benhabib, 1992) and 'nomad' (Braidotti, 1994) in order to explore the issues of location and transition that form part of the material and subjective experiences of the returning woman. More immanent, however, is a conversation with Francis (1999). Becky Francis explores the relations between poststructuralism and the modernist emancipatory project of feminism. She illustrates the tensions in the binary of poststructural/modern and makes an appeal that we need to continue to worry away at the 'theoretical brick wall' (p 391) of this binary. My purpose is to contribute to Francis' appeal through the analysis that I present of the multiply located subject-in-process that is the woman returner. Specifically I argue that if we seriously wish to worry away at the binaries in academic debate we need to develop practices of critical literacy that recognise the reader as similarly multiply located and subjectively-in-process. As it is much of the contemporary literature continues to set up the reader as the humanist subject who can rationally choose, and is willing to be fixed by, some form of 'correct' intellectual position. |
