Reconstructing Policy in Higher Education: Feminist Poststructural Perspectives (review)

What is feminist poststructuralism? Why is it important? How can it be useful to advance policy conversations related to higher education? Reconstructing Policy in Higher Education: Feminist Poststructural Perspectives, a volume edited by Elizabeth Allan, Susan Van Deventer Iverson, and Rebecca Ropers-Huilman, addresses these and other questions related to advancing the creation, implementation, and use of policy conversations. The book is a valuable resource for administrators, policy makers, researchers, and students wanting to think in new and different ways about policy affecting colleges and universities.

For readers not familiar with feminist poststructuralism (FPS) and policy analysis, the book is foundational and informative. In Chapters 1 and 2, the editors provide a reminder about some of the core concepts related to policy and they address how feminist poststructuralism can be used to problematize "what has come to be taken-for granted as 'normal' everyday practice" (p. 2). Chapter 2 authored by Elizabeth Allan is particularly helpful for readers to understand FPS and all the other "posts" bantered about in higher education circles. Because the tenets of FPS are so clearly laid out as a tool of analysis, readers can use this knowledge to examine situations common to higher education that are threaded throughout the remaining chapters.

The approach to policy analysis put forth by the editors widens the audience and is a guide for those new to the study of FPS and higher education policy. The book is particularly useful to analyze gender in contemporary policy discourses yet it is not limited to people interested in gender. FPS as a tool of analysis is far reaching.

Part 1 of the book entitled Productions of Power through Presence with Absence includes three chapters that critically analyze the dominant, neoliberal narrative prominent in higher education. This part of the book presents historical and macroscopic perspectives of policy, discourse, and FPS in higher education. In Chapter 3 Jana Nidiffer offers FPS as a "corrective" agent to view the history of higher education by asking, "Who benefits from the story being told in this particular way and what are the consequences of having knowledge framed in this manner?" (p. 44). Her work brings forth the silent narrative of the female student suffragist movement all but missing from higher education history texts. In Chapter 4 Tatiana Suspitsyna questions the contemporary articulations of the purpose of higher education by using Foucault's (1972) view of discourse and power as productive not repressive. Through an analysis of documents from the Department of Education, almost entirely authored by Secretary Margaret Spelling, Suspitsyna deconstructs the purpose of higher education. The results strongly suggest that a neoliberal market discourse reinforces the hegemonic masculine status quo in contemporary higher education. The same notion of man as ideal consumer of higher education is also present in the discourse surrounding leadership in higher education. In Chapter 5 Gordon, Iverson, and Allan use The Chronicle of Higher Education to examine the how dominant notions of femininity and masculinity were used to "produce gendered images of leaders" (p. 82). Not surprisingly, female leaders were portrayed as "caretaker" and "vulnerable" leaders among other labels. The authors provide several examples used in their analysis that provide further context for "the double bind" conflict female professionals at all levels experience (p. 90).

Part 2, Subjects and Objects of Policy, is focused on students and is likely to be of particular interest to those who work with students. The chapters help readers see how policy works discursively for students on paper, but against students in action. In Chapter 6, Susan Talburt used the idea of "becoming" to show how the university rhetoric of "involvement" actually creates what Foucault (1977) described as, "normalizing judgment" (p. 183). In the case of LGBT students, Talburt explores the tensions between a discourse of victimization and the roles of student as both active subject and passive object of university policy created for and by...