1. Thinking about what is and what might be … Dr Dorothy Morrissey Department of Arts Education and Physical Education Mary Immaculate College, Limerick dorothy.morrissey@mic.ul.ie

2. Gender ‘as’ performance

3. ‘All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts’ As You Like It 2, 7:139-142

4. ‘... the purpose of playing … was and is, to hold, as ‘t were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ Hamlet 3, 2: 21-25

5. To be female [...] has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project. [...] Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished [... ] because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. [... ] The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is [naturalised and] obscured by the credibility of its own production. Butler, J. (1988, p.522)

6. Performativity Cultural codes (performatives) that precede, exceed and are separate from the performer (e.g. codes related to being male or female) Performativity refers to the ways in which these codes are maintained through repetition and regulation

7. Gender In public discourse, the ‘masculine’ is identified as the norm Non-normative experience silenced and sanctioned Bourdieu (2001); Butler (1999)

8. No Job for a Woman: The Impact of Gender in School Leadership (NASUWT, The Teachers’ Union, 2010)

9. The Career Progression of Women Teachers in England: a Study of Barriers to Promotion and Career Development (Final Report of the Women Teachers’ Careers and Progression Project, June 2005)

10. An evolutionary road …