Producing Neoliberal Subjectivities

Introduction

In this article, I am interested in exploring the relation between literacy, neoliberalism, gender, and their intersections with race and class using the feminist methodology of collective biography. I ask, in becoming literate, how are girls also interpolated into discourses of neoliberal subjectivity? How is the current economic order playing a part in shaping gendered subjectivities through literacy? In what ways do educational discourses and practices simultaneously constitute students as gendered (raced and classed) and literate subjects? In some education orthodoxies, writing is presented as primarily a means of accessing and discovering an already existing self and world. Literacy is also often understood as libratory, particularly in relation to disenfranchised peoples (Freire, 1970) or nations that struggle as members of the global economy (Hesford, 2011). In contrast, I am interested in investigating how girls take up language constructions in social ways and thus, through their literacy practices, come to know themselves and their worlds in particular gendered, raced, and classed ways. The differences between the success of boys and girls in schooling (with girls’ success seen as coming at a cost to boys’) are a dominant and contested discourse within education (Skelton & Francis, 2011). It has led to most gender and literacy research to be focused exclusively on boys (Kehler, 2010; McCready, 2012; Weaver-Hightower, 2003). Here, I am interested in literacy and the differences between girls. I want to examine both dominant and oppositional discourses of what it means to produce knowledge and culture through writing, and explore the forms of practical relation to self that are enabled and/or disabled through a writer’s negotiation with them.

Literacy, as de Castell (1996) points out, has been one of Western culture’s primary technologies for the formation of the self. Foucault investigated and documented uses of literacy as a disciplined set of techniques for self-formation, as a technology for “care of the self” that changed in different historical periods. In ancient times, he outlines, writing was associated with the care of the self, the training of the self by the self, and was essential to the “art of living” (Foucault, 1988, p. 208). Writing was seen as a practice for training the conscious, rational, thinking free man. It was not a practice of delving into the depths of a self (Gannon, 2006), as it is often currently conceived. Foucault traces the shift in early Christianity from care of the self to an ethical imperative to “know” the self. Writing became one site for the scrutiny and reconsideration of the body and the emotions—the inner self as well as the outer self. Mills exemplifies this notion: “Writing is among other things, always a way of trying to understand your-self. You understand your own feelings and your own ideas only by writing them down”(Mills & Mills, 2000, p. 21). The intensification of this relation in recent times can also be seen in the proliferation of books on journaling as a path to self-discovery (Whitney, 2006).

Literacy practices have also been directly linked with the economy. Michel de Certeau (1984) writes that for the past three centuries “learning to write has been the very definition of entering into a capitalist and conquering (masculine) society” (p. 136). I am interested here in further investigating the linkages between literacy as a gendered technology of self-formation and what this might mean in a neoliberal economic and social context. Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is understood as a mode of political and economic rationality characterized by privatization, deregulation, and the withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision. It rose to prominence in the 1980s under the Reagan administration in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. It expanded its global economic reach through international organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which imposed structural adjustment policies and reshaped development initiatives through neoliberal principles. Although neoliberal ideology has spread, Ong (2006) stresses that it does not take an identical form in every region of the world it has reached. Rather, each iteration of it may have local nuances.

Beyond their influence in economic and social policy, neoliberal ideologies have also infiltrated notions of what it means to be a person. Neoliberalism sees the principles of the market as applicable to all spheres of human life. As Jessica Ringrose (2013) suggests, “Neoliberalism operates as a totalizing discourse through which subjectivity is re-constituted in economic terms, where market values and commodification thoroughly saturate the construction of self and other” (p. 3). Self-managing, autonomous, and entrepreneurial are the idealized characteristics of the neoliberal subject. Under neoliberalism, profound changes to global labor markets, local economies, and relations between citizens and states have created a culture of uncertainty that requires the production of new forms of subjectivity (Gill & Scharff, 2011; Gonick, 2007; Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001). With the dismantling of state infrastructure and programs, individuals are made responsible for their own life “choices” and are encouraged to make sense of their individual biographies in terms of discourses of freedom and choice—no matter how many structural constraints may actually factor into the organization of their lives (Rose, 1991). Such self-invention demands a particular kind of psychological subject: one that understands itself as rational and autonomous and is able to transform itself to meet the ever-changing demands of a flexible economy and endure the insecurity of rapidly shifting social structures and relations.

Collective Biography and Girlhood Stories of Learning to Write

I use girlhood stories of learning to write that were produced through collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006), to explore how girls’ literacy practices are imbricated in producing themselves as gendered, raced, and classed neoliberal subjects. I worked with a group of undergraduate students, who were enrolled in my upper-level women’s studies course on feminist research at a large, publicly funded, U.S. university. There were 10 young women in the class: The majority were White, 1 was African American, and 1 was Asian American, an immigrant originally from Cambodia, who was a recipient of a scholarship for the children of migrant workers. About half the students were from middle-class families and the other half were from working-class families. The girls from working-class families were among the first in their families to be university educated. A few of the students identified as queer.

I had assigned Bronwyn Davies’ (2000b) book (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations to introduce the students to collective biography, a research method that draws on memory stories to investigate processes of subjectification. Collective biography had intrigued me for some time, but this was the first time I had tried to use it. Most often, collective biography is organized around an intensive workshop where participants spend days together, sometimes residing in a shared dwelling, rather than in a classroom context. Thus, it was a modified version of collective biography that we were able to do. My students were keen to try it, and as a means of understanding more about it, after we had read the book, we used several classes to work on our own collective biography. We chose the topic of writing/becoming literate as our theme and during one class, we shared stories from childhood memories and more recent experiences within school and family contexts. Usually, once a theme is picked, a series of readings on the topic are read by the group with the idea that these readings will inform the discussion and analysis of the stories. In this instance, this did not occur because at the time we were merely undertaking a research exercise. It was sometime afterward that I decided to go further, and with the students’ consent, I have turned the exercise into this article.

The specific strategies of collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006) outline a writing and listening practice that had the 11 of us exchanging stories verbally, listening intensely, and questioning any aspects of the stories for richer detail. We began simply with each of us telling a story, our desks in a circle. Sometimes the memory of one person would elicit memories of others. We each chose one of our stories to write down, using rich detail to try and get at the embodied memories. During the following class, we shared the stories in written form. ¹ Some stories were revised again based on others’ responses and to rid the stories of clichés and explanatory writing. In this way, we worked toward a collectively generated theorization of doing girlhood literacy, albeit from the perspective of different generations, classes, sexualities, nationalities, and racialized backgrounds, that exceeded any autobiographical account that any of us might have made individually. This methodology makes a radical break with phenomenology, which might search for a literal truth in the stories. Instead, collective biography understands memory to create the moment again each time it is remembered, and that memories are always bumping up against the affects of others (Gonick, Walsh, & Brown, 2011), against new knowledges, creating for the first time the moment in which the memory is told, as well as the remembered moment. After we had collectively analyzed our stories, and discussed the ways in which they revealed how literacy is intricately entangled in the process of becoming certain kinds of girls, each writer also wrote a short reflective piece on the stories and her own collective biography writing process.

Gender, Race, and Writing

There is, of course, a long history of the complex relationship between women and writing that also needs to be factored into making sense of the stories we wrote over those few classes. As John Willinsky (1995) suggests in outlining the feminist scholarship on the issue, what is at stake in learning how to write is how writing is always already structured within the social organization and production of difference based on gender. He writes, “The path of the word is already written out of an extremely gendered history” (p. 247). For Sara Ahmed (1998), both gender and race are mutually implicated as differences that matter within the discursive formations of authorship. That is, this discursive relation of address in which authorship is implicated involves both colonial and gendered dimensions, and these are always features of the already constituted meanings of writer. At issue, therefore, are not the inherent qualities or interests in the writing that are determined by gender, but rather an attempt to bring attention to how writing is always implicated in a discursive relation of address, which is irreducible to sexual difference (Ahmed, 1998; Willinsky, 1995). Historically, as we have already seen, writing was tied to certain kinds of masculinity, which has led some to suggest that women’s relationship to writing can be quite fraught as a result. For example, Gilbert (1992) argues that although girls are often considered good classroom writers, it is men who have historically been regarded as the writers of philosophy, psychology, science, history, poetry, and drama. She goes on to suggest that many young women “learn to read and write as ‘men’ in that they learn to apply masculinist reading frames and to adopt masculinist generic forms” (p. 197). There is, however, a cost to women in writing to demonstrate and share knowledges that have historically been associated with the masculine. As Clipperton (1996) contends, “Whenever women write, we are breaking a primary social taboo. Whenever we publish we challenge dominant notions of femininity” (p. 79). The result, according to Clipperton, is that women have had to give up aspects of their identity to do it. In describing her own devastating dissertation experience, Mona Kumpula Scheffer (2000) reflects that her despair had to do with “the death of herself as a subject in the process of writing and that while the chapters she wrote used proper, authorized academic language, they were also infused with terror on every page” (p. 7).

A second current of feminist thought on writing is interested in the disruptive potential of language, one that breaks apart old certainties and generates new ways of writing, new forms, and new images that open up previously unimagined possibilities. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement (1986) see writing as a means to invent the world anew and as a utopian space removed from patriarchal structures of repression and violence. They are confident that the authority currently structured through gender can be reconstructed through new forms of writing:

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. (p. ix)

Following Lacan, Rhedding-Jones (2000) suggests that writing offers girls engagements with the fantasies denied by spoken language. She says, “the girl/woman who begins to write finds a mechanism of voicing the desires controlled up until now by (spoken) symbolic order of language. Though literacy girls enter more orderings of language, of psyches, and of the unconscious” (p. 269). Similarly, Davies (2000a) suggests that writing is not about escape from being constituted through discourse. Rather, in being subjected, we can search out in writing “the possibilities for creative movement beyond the current terms of our subjection” (Davies, 2000a, p. 181). However, it is also precisely because of the generative potential of writing that it is terrifying. Cixous and Calle-Gruber (1997) write,

To think that we have at our disposal the biggest thing in the universe, and that it is language. What one can do with language is . . . infinite. What one can do with the smallest sign!. . . This may be why so many people do not write: because it’s terrifying. And conversely, it is what makes certain people write: because it’s intoxicating. Language is all powerful. You can say everything, do everything, that has not yet been said, not yet been done. (p. 12)

It is this combination of terror, possibility, regulation, and rupture that I want to explore in the collective biography stories about learning to write—and how they link to neoliberal subjectivity.

The Blank Page: Girls, Writing, and Producing the Self

The blank page as understood by de Certeau is a “space of its own [that] delimits a place of production for the subject” (cited in Davies & Saltmarsh, 2007, p. 9). Simultaneously a site of isolation and distance from the world, as well as a site of mastery and autonomy over the production of text, the blank page is a means by which particular subject positions are made available. Thus, through the very space of the page, the scriptural subject is, de Certeau says, constituted within a particular set of discursive understandings and possibilities. However, in exploring the gendered dimensions of literacy practices, Davies and Saltmarsh (2007) take issue with de Certeau’s assertion of the “scriptural enterprise” as “capitalist and conquering” (p. 10). Such a perspective seems focused on the masculine and cannot account for the ways girls may use literacy practices as a means to accomplish themselves as appropriately gendered, as “good girls,” and as appropriately situated in relation to the economic world in ways that may differ from that of the (masculinized) “industrialist or philosopher” positions suggested by de Certeau.

The multi-faceted relation of a writer to the blank page was a feature of many of the stories produced in the class. Teresa, ² a young, working-class lesbian, wrote in her reflective essay that her relationship to writing has always been a difficult one. Although other forms of creative expression, such as art and cartooning, came easy to her and were a source of joy and amusement, writing has always been a frustration and a struggle.

Sitting and facing the window with the feel of the hardwood chair under me, the table, my paper and pencil. My grandmother’s authoritative words, which I receive resentfully, “You can’t go out and play until you are finished writing your letters.” I’m five and filled with energy and excitement for the warm spring weather. I can see the yard from where I am sitting and the specks of sunlight shining on the table are taunting me. I stare down at my paper at the little cartoon man in the police uniform holding the stop sign. He stares back. I hate his face. I have to learn the alphabet and we’re only on the letter G. I squeeze my pencil tightly and press hard on my paper, concentrating on every curve. I struggle to finish the top line. I must be sure to make my G touch the top, the dotted middle and the bottom lines in all the right spots.

My grandfather walks by puffing his pipe and asks, “How’s your homework going Mugsy?” I lie and say, “Okay,” but he knows by the look on my face that I’m struggling. Hence the name “Mugsy”—I never hide my feelings well. So he stands behind me and takes my hand with the pencil in it. He gently helps me make the first G and then the second on the second line, explaining that I need to be patient because it’s important to practice. I listen to his words and continue on after he and the smell of the pipe leave the room. It seems like I have been sitting at the table forever. The dirt and the grass and the trees are just a few feet away and are fuelling my desire to finish. When I finally make the last G I yell happily for my grandmother to come give her approval. She emerges from the basement door with jars of preserves in her hands, places them on the table, looks at my hard work poured out in dark bold lines and tells me I can go. So with satisfaction, I run out the door.

Along with the letter G, much else is being learned here. At 5 years old, the girl learning to write is also being educated in the habits necessary to become a self-regulating subject. Although she yearns for the freedom of the outdoors and immersing herself in the corporeal pleasures offered by the sun, dirt, grass, and trees, the girl must first endure sitting on a hard chair at the table for what seems like “forever,” dutifully and resentfully pressing pencil to paper to carefully create the controlled hand movements that will form the proper curves and shapes to meet the lines on the paper and make letters. Contrary to de Certeau’s (1984) contention that the blank page offers a space for the child to manage what is “his own and distinct from all others and in which he can exercise his own will,” (p. 134), here the blank page seems a space of submission to authority. The stern and distant grandmother, the cartoon policeman, and the rules of writing impose restrictions on the girl, impeding her body movement and taming her spirit. Even the kindly grandfather counsels patience and forbearance in the face of her struggle, attributes of the “good girl” student and future worker. These restrictions are contrasted with the liberties of the outdoors and the natural world with which she feels such a powerful affinity. Through her entry into literacy, she is learning what is perhaps the most important of all school lessons—taking her “pleasures within reason” (Foucault, 1985; McWilliam, 2000). She is learning the rules of a certain kind of subjectivity, one that can regulate its own desires, submit to the repetitive practice of rules, and is obedient to authority. As Walkerdine et al. (2001) show in their comparative study of working- and middle-class girls, working-class life is epitomized by overt forms of power and authority, and a strong distinction between paid work and play, which features in the mothering practices of working-class mothers. In contrast, distinctions between work and play are muted in middle-class mothering practices (Walkerdine et al., 2001).

The blank page and learning to write in cursive are features of the story another student wrote. Eleanor grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb with parents who are both highly educated with advanced and professional degrees.

She is sitting at the child-size red table in the playroom bent over a blank page. All her effort is concentrated into writing beautiful cursive print. In her opinion, she is a much better cursive writer than most of her friends, but a few of them are neater than she is, and so she needs to get it right. She thinks of Eumy and McKenzie, who sit in her cluster of desks during handwriting and effortlessly write beautiful lines, never smudging or tearing little holes in the paper from erasing too hard. She wants it to be that easy for her. She wants to be the best. She pictures the teacher, Gail, coming over to her desk and holding up her paper, as she did with Eumy’s paper, showing it to the class as a perfect example of cursive. She wants to be smart too. Yet, each time she would try so hard and tension just built in her hand, her grip sweaty and the pencil tip breaking. Her hand aches from gripping the pencil so tight and she leans in closer so her face is about three inches from the sheet. She has to go to the bathroom, but she needs to get this right so she shifts her weight and crosses her legs. Her frustration grows as the sweat from her palm transfers over onto the paper and smudges the writing, leaving a sooty mark. She just can’t get it perfect. As the paper rips once more, her tension boils over. She stands up and grabs both ends of the pencil and snaps it in half.

Here again, a girl is at a table practicing her writing. In this case, however, there does not appear to be an external force requiring her submission; her will to practice seems to be internalized. The table she sits at is in the playroom, a space dedicated to children, rather than the public space of the kitchen table in the previous story. Class difference is thus signaled despite some clear similarities between the stories. As in the previous story, the girl is exerting great effort to learn the proper form and to style her uncooperative body to produce it. A sweaty palm undermines her effort, producing frustration and stress. She ignores her body’s need to urinate and her aching hand. Here the anxious tension in this story is not just about the complications of learning to write and the corporeal denial necessary to become a self-regulating subject. There is an intensity to the punishing norms of self-discipline that suggests nothing less than excellence will do. As Walkerdine et al. outline in their U.K. study, in the current time of economic change, uncertainty, and restructuring of the labor market, the expectation for the middle-class girls in their study was to work really hard to achieve high standards. However, the activities that were to produce this excellence were hidden in a set of discourses that enshrined the notion of excellence with middle-class normality (Walkerdine et al., 2001).

The girl in the story also emphasizes her task as a competitive endeavor in relation to her classmates. She wants to be the best. And she wants the public recognition that ensues from being singled out by the teacher as an example for others to follow. Interestingly, she positions herself as both capable (“she is a much better cursive writer than most of her friends”) and not capable at the same time.

This focus on being the best is, perhaps, reflective of the development of an increasingly competitive educational system and a drive toward the achievement of more and higher qualifications for those wanting to achieve and/or maintain middle-class status (Allatt, 1993). In the story, learning to write in cursive is only experienced as competitive; no other dimensions of what it might mean are referenced. One’s own success is achieved at the cost of another, as this model of education is expressly designed so that only some can win. This story reveals how, in becoming literate, the girl is also accomplishing herself as appropriately situated in relation to an economic world organized around neoliberal global capitalist principles of competition.

In the following story, learning cursive is also a central feature. Caitlyn is the youngest child in her upper-middle-class family. At the time this story was written, Caitlyn was experiencing what she called “severe writer’s block.” In tears, she tells me outside of class that not being able to write has put her into a state of emotional and academic crisis and that the block is not something new; rather, it had defined her entire high school experience. In her early years of university, she had experienced some relief from this block, but in this, her final year, it was back with a vengeance and was so serious it was even jeopardizing her graduation. Despite two attempts at taking a required writing course, she was unable to complete it, which is all the more troubling given that she was a top student and a good writer. She said that when she could bring herself to attend this class at all, she would sit in class crying uncontrollably. More often, she could not even get herself to go. She could not do any of the assignments. Alarmed by the situation, her mother had arrived from out of town so she could sit at her daughter’s side at the computer, as that was the only way Caitlyn was able to do any school work that involved writing.

The teacher draws lines on the blackboard with a ruler. The teacher traces the cursive letters on the board. Showing the students how to make each part of the letter. The girl looks at the board from her desk and down at her own black-and-white lined paper. She carefully traces the letter on her paper, over and over.

One day she hands in her homework to the teacher. She had to write the homework in cursive. The teacher is kneeling on the carpet, putting the student homework into a box on the floor, separating them. Teacher looks up and says that cursive is important; in fifth grade, we will have to write everything in cursive. Teacher says this with anger in her voice. The girl feels very nervous. Her eyes open wide and stare blankly, and she starts breathing faster. Her chest feels tight. She starts thinking very fast. She wonders how she will ever be able to write everything in cursive someday. That is so hard! She does not look forward to fifth grade. She is filled with terror.

After school waiting for the bus, someone in her class is talking about fifth grade and writing in cursive. The girl knows it is important. She knows it is serious, just like the teacher warned them. She is very quiet and her mind fills with worries. She thinks about how hard fifth grade will be.

In Caitlyn’s reflection piece, she suggests that

the process of learning how to write in cursive marks the start of when I learn to perceive an academic task as something that will put my ability to do well at stake. The teacher frames the future of schooling as one of difficult obstacles, and in effect, I begin to view the future of my academic life with dread and fear.

In psychoanalytic terms, writer’s block is an unconscious conflict that is so frightening that the writer comes to a halt. Given that Caitlyn is both highly successful at school yet racked by fear so pervasive she is literally unable to write, what kinds of conflicts may be at work here? In their study, Walkerdine et al. (2001) found that middle-class femininity is regulated in such a way as to produce educational success allowing women’s entry into professions that were once the nearly exclusive province of men; however, becoming the bourgeois feminine subject under the new conditions of a feminized economy is not achieved easily and not without a struggle. They argue that for the middle-class girls in their study, the imperative to succeed educationally often came with considerable emotional costs (Walkerdine et al., 2001). Worry and fear surrounded middle-class educational achievement, because, they argue, in the current climate of economic uncertainty, academic success is a defense against uncertainty and possible downward mobility. Caught in cultural, structural, and class discourses, Walkerdine et al.’s (2001) middle-class participants were on a “roundabout of outstanding achievement while never sure they had made the grade” (p. 167). In middle-class families, they found that what looked like seamless success covered over a powerful fear of failure and deep anxieties that seemed increasingly to underpin that very performance of success (Walkerdine et al., 2001).

In many ways, this could also be Caitlyn’s story. On the surface, her achievement appears to come easily. She eventually graduates with the highest grade point average in her cohort. ³ Throughout her ordeal, she is always impeccably coiffed and dressed. Her makeup is never less than perfect and except for her bouts of crying, she never appeared outwardly stressed. Her story demonstrates the imbrications of excellence and rationality as a middle-class norm necessary for the production of the bourgeois subject. Although formally attached exclusively to the masculine, the shift in the labor market from production to service has positioned girls like Caitlyn as the success stories of the new global economy. And yet below the surface lies an intense anxiety finding expression in the terror of the blank page.

The final story I want to discuss is quite different from the others we have seen. It is written by Saronje, who came to the United States from Cambodia as a child. At the time, she was one of the few students of color in the women’s studies program. Her parents owned a small corner store in a neighborhood known for intense poverty, drug abuse, and violence. Her mother sometimes also worked the night shift in a factory, leaving 8-year-old Saronje to look after her younger brothers. She was able to attend the university through a scholarship program. Just as her relation to the economic rationality of neoliberalism is different from the other girls in the class, her story shows that her relation to literacy is also quite different.

There was a writing contest at school. All the students had to write a short story about an animal. The best story from each class would win. I wrote about a Cambodian driver who hit a deer on his way home from work. After he hit the deer, he hauled the dead creature into the back of his truck and drove home. When he got home, he chopped the deer up and gave some to his neighbors. It was a true story.

When it was my turn to read my story to the class, the students said I was weird. My teacher thought I was being obnoxious. I thought I was telling a funny story. I had deer for dinner that same night.

Unlike the previous narratives, this is a story about writing a story and the consequences that ensue. The focus of her story is not on her own feelings about writing it, but on the responses of others—her classmates and teacher. Saronje uses the collective biography exercise to retell her story about the deer and how it was received by her teacher and fellow students. I suspect she does so for reasons that are similar to why she told it in the original context of her middle school. In her reflection piece, Saronje writes,

I notice that my peers spoke about learning to write and the emotions they felt, but for me, it was a different story. I did not learn to write to try to be the best or to do it because I did not want to be behind. I wrote because I wanted to be heard. In thinking about my story, I feel that racism and sexism was the main influence into what I felt and believed. I wrote from a need to be heard, a need to speak out, and a need to be recognized for who and what I am. I did not write to be the smartest or most creative kid in class, I wrote because no one listened to me. No one listened to Saronje.

Here, Saronje draws on feminist discourse of voice, sexism, and racism to position herself and her writing as different than her classmates. She is trying to write a different story of girlhood, one that is decidedly not White, or middle-class, or focused on neoliberal principles of success or competitive individualism. Although she is writing for a story contest, she does not set out to win it nor does she appear to want to. There is a certain knowingness in her refusal to produce the expected genre of animal story—either domesticated, gentle, cute, and loving or wild, majestic, dangerous, and beautiful. In telling a story about road-kill that is shared and eaten by neighbors, Saronje’s agenda is clearly not to be perfect or to succeed on the expected terms of the school and her peers. She has an altogether different agenda—to be heard and to have her difference acknowledged. She is resisting the tyranny of sameness, as she writes in another part of the collective biography series: “What did you get for Christmas, Saronje? How many teachers asked me that, never bothering to learn that we don’t celebrate Christmas?”

The strategy Saronje uses in her deer story is one that Judith Halberstam (2011) calls “the queer art of failure.” It is “a counterintuitive mode of knowing that is a refusal of mastery, a critique of connection within capitalism between success and profit[,] . . . and a counter hegemonic discourse of losing” (p. 12). Saronje’s choice of animal story does not seem to be about the lack of knowledge or cultural capital to produce a winning story, but about using subjugated knowledge to expressly insist on the value of disqualified content, modes of knowing, and orderings of recognition. She writes of a relation to animals from a “hood perspective” (Richardson, 2009, p. 754), one that has no middle-class sentimentality, and a relation to a story contest that challenges conventional understandings of success. She writes to provoke and here she is quite triumphant.

Conclusion: Gender, Neoliberalism, and Literacy Practices

A narration is never a passive reflection of a reality.

—T. Minh-ha Trinh (1991), When the Moon Waxes Red

Writing, argues Pam Gilbert (1992), is not a singular activity, nor is it necessarily a personal one. Rather, she continues, language has a social meaning system and every time we write we use the available social signifying system we share. As I have argued in this article, the collective biography stories about writing also show that how one makes use of the social signifying system of what it means to write is not uniform across gendered social positions. Rather, the relationship between writers and the texts they produce is affected by the system of social relations within which writing takes place. Writing is intricately entangled with the way in which becoming certain kinds of girls is accomplished and with producing the knowledge of how one accomplishes agency and power in relation to one’s social group and to the economic order. As Davies and Saltmarsh (2007) contend, being gendered (and I would add raced, classed, and sexed) shapes engagement in literate practices. Literate practices in turn shape the ways in which one becomes gendered, raced, and classed. In other words, literacy, gender, and social power are mutually constitutive.

In presenting the stories of differently classed, raced, and sexed young women, I am not intending to essentialize or to render uniform the differing experiences of the story writers to all others who may inhabit the same social positions. Rather, I am aiming to show how classed, raced, and gendered literate subjectivities are tied in different ways to the neoliberal social and economic contexts in which we live. My aim is also to re-introduce girls into literacy discussions within the field of education, as the debates have, for too long focused exclusively on boys’ relation to reading and writing as a crisis of masculinity. If we understand literacy as a technology of self-making, then it is also important to explore the evolving relations of various femininities to the contested meaning of “writer” and what it means to produce knowledge and culture through writing. The girlhood stories about learning to write that I present here reveal a practical relation to the self that incorporates elements of neoliberal subjectivity (and resistance to it). The stories show how girls who are differently positioned along the intersections of race, class, and sexuality become literate subjects through also becoming or not becoming self-regulating, competitive, and disciplined. They show the affective responses to both the constraints and possibilities of what it means to encounter and work with and against the blank page.