Walkerdine deals with affective factors in learning via gender identity
issues, or as Jay said, uses "gender as a lens to magnify affective aspects
of social learning..." Her argument revolves around (as Ellice noted) the
will to mastery that formal education presupposes, demands, and ensures as
integral to our cultural being. She shows that the thematic content of math
problems are either attractive or repellant to kids, and that this effect is
gendered. Jay notes that Walkerdine includes in her math-at-home-and-school
study the argument that that abstract rationality conceptualized as
separate and better than concrete emotionality is an effect of the project
of middleclass, eurocentric males to define themselves against all others,
and Jay calls for a sociology of affect.
I can't find my copy of Walkerdine's book (_Mastery of Reason_), but I'm
sure I remember (while acknowledging the shoddiness of my memory) that
Walkerdine introduces her study with an argument informed in large part by
psychoanalytic theory. I have the sense that psychoanalysis is anathema to
many cultural historical activity theorists who see it as a science of
what's "inside," when it is profoundly relational and clinically grounded -
the family as the stage for social patterning within the larger culture. I
see psychoanalysis more and more as the most sociologically astute theory of
affect available to us.
Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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