Misogyny, the White Woman/Mother/Teacher Entanglement, and Florida’s Anti-Intellectual Project: Curricular Possibilities for Transcendence

Authors

Natalie D. Carro, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Curriculum and Instruction

First Advisor's Name

James P. Burns

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Rebecca Christ

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Ana Luszczynska

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Sarah Mathews

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

Curriculum theory, gender, women, whiteness, teaching, currere, anti-intellectualism

Date of Defense

6-21-2023

Abstract

This study explores an educational problem of the present: the overrepresentation of white women in public school teaching and the entangled archetype of the white woman/ mother/teacher. Historically, mothers have been socially and politically positioned as the family’s moral center in a cruel world, and those who have been allowed to count as mothers in the U.S. public imagination have also been those who further embody the characteristics of whiteness. Consequently, contemporary motherhood has been institutionalized by discourses of normative motherhood that reify white, heteropatriarchal norms and frame the white, middle-class, heterosexual mother as singularly capable of perfecting children onto whom the future health of the nation is projected.

The white woman/mother/teacher is a figure who has been discursively produced as moral guardian whose reproductive labor is essential to the health of the state. Schools and teachers, therefore, function within relations of state and institutional power as saviors of the nation and are expected to form the subjectivities of children as our hope for the future. All our hopes for transcending social ills have historically been focused on education, specifically the white woman teacher, via the children the teacher teaches. Teaching, as a feminized profession, thus positions teachers simultaneously as heroes who sacrifice for their students and as failures under onerous regimes of punitive accountability.

The study employs Pinar’s method of currere, which includes four steps to reactivate the past, re-enter the present, reimagine the future, and reconstruct one’s subjectivity through academic study with the possibility of reconstructing the social world. The study is further informed by Barad’s diffractive analysis and Manne’s theorization of the logic of misogyny. The dissertation concludes that the hegemony of white women in public school teaching is an integral condition of possibility for the current proliferation of anti-intellectual legislation targeting public education in Florida. The analysis also suggests that the entanglement of the white woman/mother/teacher is a site of tension within an educational system that reduces students to data points, curriculum to scripts, and teachers to data managers with possibilities to transcend the reinscription of past practices of instrumental schooling on the future.

Identifier

FIDC011191

Recommended Citation

Carro, Natalie D., "Misogyny, the White Woman/Mother/Teacher Entanglement, and Florida’s Anti-Intellectual Project: Curricular Possibilities for Transcendence" (2023). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 5375.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/5375