“Are we going to read anything that’s not written by white men about white men?": A Mother and Daughter Working for School Change

Using a feminist poststructuralist analysis (Baxter 2003; Weedon 1997) we examine the multiple ways that mothers and daughters are constructed and positioned through school interactions and how this process reflects broader discourses related to legitimate parent and student roles, normative female behavior, and family-school relationships. This analysis also forces us to consider the ways that discursive practices “are structured, what power relations they produce and reproduce, where there are resistances, and where we might look for weak points more open to challenge and transformation” (Weedon 1997, 132). The analysis highlights how parents and students are marginalized when challenging issues of authority, white supremacy, and patriarchal hegemony, and how school involvement can be a means for parents to “apprentice” their children in civic engagement.