Making a good Victoria Sponge cake: Schooling Empire, class, gender and sexuality

Abstract

How do we communicate our work to our students and our friends who don't speak in the same academic tongues as we do? Using critical personal narrative, and a nice Homely metaphor, rather than poststructuralese, I explain what happens to a body in education, and how power works to produce it, say, as white, Imperial 1 A word about voice and fonts. While writing up The Body's Tale, I became concerned about how to allow the body its voice; I decided to use a specific font to represent the Body, my co‐writer, who lacked the power to communicate as I could. The font allowed the Body a visual and textual voice. The very act of having to edit text and change all the ‘body’ words to a different font also forced me to continually recognize the body's presence‐hard to do when you get stuck in your mind. Similarly, I used a Victorian font to denote the Imperial discourse at work, as a visual cue and as a means of intimating discursivity at play, and a Greek font for the words about ethics, self‐care and self‐writing. I know some readers find the different fonts annoying‐but within the discursive constraints of communicative power circulating in the academy and its journals, it's one way of offering resistant voices or subject knowledges a shot at being seen, if not heard. And perhaps it's interesting, too, for us to note the irritation at non‐normed fonts, or textual styles, and to interrogate that irritation … a signal that power is at work? Or maybe a cigar is just a cigar, and it's just really annoying? , middle class and heterosexual. Alternating temporal frames, I tell the counter history of doing my (body's) counterhistory. I encourage you, my reader to settle in, get comfortable, make a cup of tea, and as we counter‐read/write, I hope we will come to understand my/our (counter) stories.