ABSTRACT
IN THE THINKING THAT PRECEDED THE WRITING OF THIS ESSAY, I TRIED TO IMAGINE WHAT this collection of papers about feminist engagements with male theorists who have influenced educational thought might look like and how I might add to that conversation something useful in regard to my own rich and complex engagement with two French theorists, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Obviously, each of us writing here has different stories about how we came to theory and to certain theorists, and I am particularly interested in the conditions of that coming-to and taking-up; that is, I am interested in Judith Butler’s (1995) question, “[H]ow is it that we become available to a transformation of who we are, a contestation which compels us to rethink ourselves, a reconfiguration of our ‘place’ and our ‘ground’?” (131). Or, conversely, how is it that we find ourselves unavailable to transformation by theory? In sum, how is it that some theories/theorists are intelligible and even seductive while others are not? What makes us ready to engage or inclined to resist? And how do our attachments change as we use and, perhaps, use up some theories and find we need others more adequate to address new questions we become able to hear?
