Gettin' a little crafty: Teachers Pay Teachers©, Pinterest© and neo-liberalism in new materialist feminist research

• Published in: Gender and education Vol. 29; no. 1; pp. 28 - 47
• Main Author: Pittard, Elizabeth A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.01.2017; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Colleges & universities; Curricula; curriculum; Discourses; Ecology; Elementary Education; Elementary School Students; Elementary school teachers; Elementary Schools; Entrepreneurship; Females; Femininity; Feminism; Feminist theory; Gender Differences; Humanities; Liberalism; Mass media; Materialism; materiality; Meaning; Mobility; Neoliberalism; Physics; Political Attitudes; Political ecology; post-structural theory; Retailing; Social Media; Social mobility; Social networks; Subjectivity; substantive topics; Teacher Characteristics; Teachers; Teachers/educators; Theories; theory; Universe; Wages & salaries; Web Sites; Women; Working women; Scotland; Edinburgh Scotland; United Kingdom > UK; Ann Arbor Michigan; United States > US
• ISSN: 0954-0253; 1360-0516
• DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2016.1197380

In this paper, I share data from a year-long study investigating the manifestations of neo-liberalism in the working lives of five women elementary school teachers in the United States. I discuss how gendered discourses of neo-liberalism construct what is understood as possible in the material-discursive production of the women's subjectivities concerning a surprising market created by teachers for teachers that is largely promoted through the social media site, Pinterest © : Teachers Pay Teachers © . Utilising new materialist feminist theory [Braidotti, R. 2000. "Teratologies." In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by I. Buchanan, and C. Colebrook, 156-172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Dolphijn, R., and I. van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press], I analyse how the teachers intra-act [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] with curricular material actants [Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] that have the capacity to alter the course of events in women's work and lives. I argue that these material actants further entangle the material-discursive, virtual-real production of subjectivity and influence women teachers in variegated but particularly gendered ways that ultimately reinforce emerging theories around the gendered nature of neo-liberal subjectivity [Gill, R. 2008. "Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times." Subjectivity 25 (1): 432-445. doi: 10.1057/sub.2008.28 ; Walkerdine, V. 2003. "Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-liberal Subject." Gender and Education 15: 237-248. doi: 10.1080/09540250303864 ].