Reading note on Feminism Confronts Democracy by Jennifer A. Tupper

    Jennifer A. Tupper starts her article by “Stolen Sisters” report which relate to the murders of Aboriginal girls and women. She challenges the assumption that democracy exists, particularly as it relates to the lives and experiences of girls and women in schools and in broader society. And she also tries to examine how women are discursively produced by universal conceptions of citizenship. She thinks education plays a crucial role in this production, exemplified in and through curriculum. She then interrogate the extent to which citizenship education, a significant goal of schooling is used to perpetuate, rather than disrupt, the fallacy of democratic education. Tupper also argues that even in modern democracy, women’s participation as full members is situated within inequalities, as public space is gendered as a masculine domain whereby “men were used as the standard or norm for understanding citizenship. Pateman theorized that the construct of citizenship was founded on the basis of the exclusion of women. Therefore, in modern liberal views of citizenship, the rights of individualism are valued, and patriarchal separation of private and public spheres is validated. 

    Tupper argues that modern liberal democracies are problematic in the context of citizenship education. The meta-narrative of universal citizenship portrayed in liberal citizenship perpetuates an acceptance “that democracy exists, despite feminist claims to the contrary, and accepts that citizenship exists universally”. In this meta-narrative, assumptions are made that the act of simply acquiring the status of citizen assures individuals are empowered as agents to enact full citizenship rights. However, Tupper maintained that full lived-experiences of citizenship are dependent on a multitude of factors, including gender. The impact of the universal citizen meta-narrative in citizenship education results in students “who are less able to understand the complexities of the world they inhabit, less able to integrate those experiences into a growing making sense “of that world”. The meta-narrative of universal citizen constrains spaces for those who are marginalized by the constructs of liberal citizenship, disempowering their capacity for agency, as the identity of citizen is assumed in democracy. 

     In this article, what I resonated with the author is that to many teachers, teaching content to students is a neutral act. And teachers simply deliver the content they have been mandated to and are careful not to declare their own perspectives or opinions. Thus, it is easy to ignore difference. We must be aware that standardizing educational goals does not mean education is democratic. 

     I found what I concerned in the article is that do the schooling the only factor that need to be challenged  as democratic institution to promote democratic education? The government and officials are also obliged to ensure the safety of Indigenous women, and to address the deeper problems of marginalization that has placed so many Indigenous women in harm’s way.

     The questions I’m considering in the article are: In what aspects must men and women be equal in order to be equal participants in a democratic system? How specifically do the schools reinforce the democratic education from curriculum perspective?