The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education

24Critical Theories and Methods in Gender and Higher Education

Marcus B. Weaver‐Hightower

Talking about “critical traditions” in gender and education seems somewhat redundant. Even bringing up gender as a dynamic – as a possible mainspring for educational phenomena – inherently means speaking critically. Gender inescapably points out social differences attached to human sexes (Goffman 1977), which then attract differences in social goods like respect, safety, labor equality, economic security, and more. Each of the chapters in this volume, then, might rightly be tagged as critical. Some gender or another – masculine, feminine, non‐binary, or trans – suffers a social disadvantage in nearly every aspect of higher education; we see few disciplines or roles that do not systematically favor one or more genders in some way, and thankfully many committed higher education faculty, staff, and students spend their days researching, teaching, making policy, acting, writing, and protesting about such injustices.

This chapter, though, cannot possibly stay so broad in its conception of critical approaches to gender. To do so would be to make the literature on higher education too vast and, resultantly, too vague to be much help to readers. Rather, I focus on a narrower slice of gender and higher education research: those for whom critical theory, specifically, has held constitutive sway in their research and writing. Namely, I lay out – incompletely, due to space and my own blindspots – ...