Abstract

This book argues that radical adult education, which supports progressive social movements and tries to produce critically reflexive people capable of shifting social balance towards social justice, needs to recast the ways that it conceives of the human subject, experience, and power by taking on board recent developments in feminist poststructuralism. Part 1 investigates the human subject, especially the female subject, as it is construed by Western academic, liberation movement, and pedagogical discourses. Chapter 1 introduces the author's epistemological stance and the social and historical context. Chapter 2 discusses the general poststructuralist opposition to the modern, unitary human subject and to essentialist models of the person. Chapter 3 examines other liberation traditions and discusses what feminist poststructuralism has in common with them, where it has developed their concepts of the person, and where it refutes them. Chapter 4 discusses implications of a feminist poststructuralist stance for liberatory pedagogy and research. Part 2 analyzes feminist subjectivities and ways of knowing. Chapter 5 examines the discourses of women and feminism that form the content of feminist consciousness for the research participants and feminist subjectivity as a process of relations in the present. Chapter 6 explores the use of psychodynamic concepts for development of feminist poststructuralist discourses. Chapter 7 tests the usefulness of the theory for the practice of women's personal development education in a feminist poststructuralist framework. Chapter 8 discusses the usefulness of feminist poststructuralism as a tool for developing radical ways in which adult education pedagogy can theorize the person and knowledge. (Contains 362 references and an index.) (YLB)