Male Hegemony through Education: Construction of Gendered Identities

Abstract

The fundamental presupposition of this paper is that ‘gender’ is a social category, hence a social construction, which can be negotiated and left fluid instead of something fixed and eternal. To examine the gendered social order, this study focuses on how hegemonic masculinity and feminine subordination are naturalized by positioning men as physically strong and women as weak on the ground of biological differences between the sexes. The study is informed by social constructionist understandings of gender. The main focus of the paper is to highlight how gendered discourses in Pakistan inform textbooks as objective and true knowledge. The data for the study comes from 28 educationists (11 females and 17 males). The study’s findings revealed that, despite prevailing claims to establishing gender equality and equity education, educationists are active in the production of gender/sexual identities and hierarchies in a ways that reinforces hegemonic ‘masculinity’ and a fixed notion of ‘femininity’. The paper concludes that what ends up as school knowledge arises from gendered power/knowledge relations.

Keywords

• Gender
• hegemonic masculinity
• social constructionism
• discourse