Abstract
The corporeality of learning is a concept resonant of the changing nature of the contemporary university. Whilst the corporeal was once seen as both female and antithetical to learning, and the university itself was envisaged as the seat of a disembodied rationality that was strongly identified as male, these perceptions can no longer be sustained. The growth in the mass participation of women in higher education, so marked, that they now form the majority of undergraduates in the UK, has disrupted the mind/body, male/female dichotomy and thrown up many questions including: What happens to learning when the learning body is female? In this chapter I shall explore this interrelationship of body and learning: whilst acknowledging that they are both mutable conjunctions of materiality and meaning. My thoughts on this subject emerge from an indepth qualitative study of 21 second-year women students studying for degrees in interdisciplinary subjects in two HE institutions which have prioritised widening participation (Quinn, 2001, 2002). My sample was a diverse one, ranging in age from 19 to 62, amongst whom roughly half identified as working-class and half middle-class. In reflection of the courses I was studying, it included a small number of black and disabled students. The students were living in varied situations: with their parents, friends, children and alone, in their home city and away from home.
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Quinn, J. (2004). The Corporeality of Learning: Women Students and the Body. In: Ali, S., Benjamin, S., Mauthner, M. (eds) The Politics of Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005532_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005532_11
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