ABSTRACT
This chapter explores identities and subjectivities drawing on the stories in the previous section but paying particular attention to gender, social class and cultural differences. The issues that we have already raised in this book about hierarchies of learning and knowledge are shaped and compounded by gendered, classed and racialised identities. We will argue that policies and practices around lifelong learning need to address ways in which identities shape, construct and constrain both participation in and definitions of learning. Whilst this chapter will argue that identities are fluid, multiple and contradictory, it will show that there are also structures in place that reinforce gendered, classed and racialised social divisions, and challenge assumptions around learning identities. We draw on feminist post-structuralist perspectives to consider the ways that learners’ identities are both discursive and structural, and are tied to social inequalities as well as cultural misrecognitions. This theoretical framework highlights the importance of theories of identity for understanding the ways in which learner dis/identifications get made and performed through the hegemonic discourses at play within educational fields and policy texts as well as through the constraints and opportunities presented by the different educational contexts in which learners and teachers are located.
