ABSTRACT

Comparative education has provided an ambiguous disciplinary space to look at issues about gender. On the one hand, some of the key works that have explored gender and education and tried to build theory in relation to global, international and translocational processes have been associated with the work of scholars in comparative and international education (e.g. Aikman 1999; Fennell and Arnot 2007; Moletsane 2005; Smyth and Rao 2005; Stromquist 1989, 1992, 1995; Vavrus 2003). On the other hand, because of the salience of comparison in educational spaces, to work in this field, some of the work of theorising gender as a relational and comparative term and what this might mean in education settings may not have ranged widely enough. Thus the comparative potential of gender as an analytical or normative idea or a practice, and its articulation with education as a particular kind of relational, intellectual and contextual engagement, appears to have been somewhat constrained. In this article I explore this ambiguous relationship. I do so partly reflecting critically on some

*Email: elaine.unterhalter@ioe.ac.uk

Vol. 50, No. 1, 112-126, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2013.872321

of my own work in this area over 30 years, partly by reviewing some of the early compilations on gender, comparative and international education from the 1970s, and partly by considering steps to formulate an approach to gender and comparative education that speaks to particular disorienting features of the present moment.