Feminist resistance and resistance to feminism in gender equality planning in Finland

Towards studying power, resistance and feminism

For Foucault, power – and with it resistance – becomes more complex and his theorizing challenged a lot of previous feminist theorizing (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 2002 [1982]; McNay, 2000). Disciplinary power and biopower form different modalities of power in Foucault’s work; they represent different ways of exercising power. Discipline works through regulating the way that space, time and people’s behaviour are organized. Disciplinary power is enforced by different systems of surveillance. Feminist scholars explore the complex webs of norms that regulate women’s subjectivities and the punishments that those who do not fit into these norms face (Butler, 1990). Biopower, in turn, is a technology for managing populations: births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population. It is a power that is ‘taking charge of life’ that, too, sometimes uses the tactics of disciplinary power (Foucault, 2002 [1982]; Repo, 2015).

Foucault (2002 [1982]: 329) suggests that in order to understand what power relations are about one should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to change these relations. Resistance, like power, is less a thing than an effect of a relation of power. Studying resistance means focusing not only on collective and highly visible forms of activism but also on the ‘subtle, routine, low level forms of struggle and challenge’ (Thomas and Davies, 2005: 720). Johansson and Lilja (2013: 269) define resistance as ‘a response to power from “below”; a subaltern practice that can challenge, negotiate, and undermine power’. Disciplinary power could be resisted by negotiating or challenging norms and hierarchies, or by refusing to participate in self-disciplinary practices that are often very gendered (Johansson and Lilja, 2013). Biopower, in turn, could be resisted by refusing to be ‘controlled, monitored, optimized and/or organized’ (Johansson and Lilja, 2013: 269). Different contexts, such as institutions, their gendered practices and norms, shape the forms of resistance (e.g. Ahmed, 2012; Richardson and Monro, 2012).

At the same time as we read the possibilities for resistance in this article, our aim is to consider what kind of actions or efforts can be read as feminist. We regard feminism as actions that challenge the gendered power relations and the regime of truths that function as rationalizations for such power relations, or attempts to do so. We do not understand feminism as separate from power relations but as acting within them and being constituted by them. The objective of our analysis is to illustrate that feminist actions are not based on some specific notion or knowledge about gender and equality but can rather take multifaceted and internally contradictory forms. Feminisms can thereby also unwillingly strengthen existing power relations. To reiterate, we do not understand feminism as either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, but rather seek to illustrate how feminist actions can have many intended and unintended consequences.

We start with the premise that activities can have beneficial consequences in terms of feminism, even if they are not named as feminist. We draw on the idea that feminism is not something that is but rather performative action (Butler, 1990) that may constitute the subjects as feminist. It is a process of subjectification (Davies, 2006). In most cases, the actions of the equality working group were not based on gender (for example, ‘womanhood’), but on the work done in the group. This could be something that Butler (1990) meant by political action, which is not based on predefined or shared identities, but the temporary and local commitments and actions. This is related to our understanding of ‘gender’. We conceptualize gender as ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’, meaning that gender is reproduced in power relations and as part of subjectification processes (Butler, 1990).

Instead of assuming a unitary, non-feminist mainstream in comparison with feminist resistance, our analysis aims to grasp the multiplicity of resistances relating to gender equality work. When ‘feminism’ has been argued to have become too powerful, or feminist resistance to dominant power structures too successful, it has also been increasingly resisted, as resistance to feminism that takes multiple forms too. Foucauldian notions of power and resistance enable us to study these discursive forms of resistance. Discursive strategies in resisting feminism include ‘gender equality having gone too far’; constructing an opposition between women’s and men’s interests; constructing an opposition between ‘good gender equality and too radical feminism’; or simply arguing that gender equality has already been achieved (Holli, 2012). In the Foucauldian sense, these discourses can be effective as they shape what is intelligible and possible. They seek to tell the ‘truth’ about feminism and hence force feminists to take part and sides in relation to the discourses. In this way, feminist resistance creates new power relations and – paradoxically – resistance to feminism (Johansson and Lilja, 2013: 272).

Methodology and data: Reading discursive power and resistance

Methodologically, we adopt the approach of discursive reading that enables us to see how the managerialist form of power works and what kind of possibilities for feminist resistance and resistance to feminism it includes (Davies, 2006; Foucault, 1978). The strength of this kind of discursive reading in analysing gender equality work is its capability to show how discourses produce ‘truths’, namely normative ways of being and doing and the ‘right’ kind of knowledge and knowing (Brunila and Ikävalko, 2012; Lombardo et al., 2009). The aim of our analysis is not to discover and name different discourses but to consider what discourses do and what effects they have (Brunila and Ikävalko, 2012).

In this article, we concentrate on interview data from three upper secondary schools and one vocational institution. The research data were collected within a wider research project and form a small part of this larger research data corpus (Ikävalko, 2013). The interviews chosen for close reading for this article consist of four group interviews carried out in small groups of two to five (12 individuals altogether). We have selected these interviews for close reading on the basis of their insights on feminist elements described as part of the gender equality work. ¹ This does not mean that a division between feminist and non-feminist interviews or interviewees can be made. Feminist and not so feminist statements could be read from every interview. We have focused our analysis in this article on the statements that are representative of the multidirectionality of power and resistance. Notably, such statements could be mapped from the other interviews too.

The interviewed teachers and other personnel members were working in the equality working groups of their schools. The gender equality group is usually put together by the principal/s and its duty is to draw up a gender equality plan for the school, to coordinate and in some cases to supervise the implementation of the school’s equality work. The interviewees had ended up in the group both on the basis of their own interest in equality work and/or they were obligated by the management of the school. In the beginning of the GEP process, the participants were not experts in gender equality work but soon started to become ones. In most cases, the timeframe for the process of GEP is tight. That is why studying the Equality Act, solving technical problems and collecting the necessary data are usually the most common content of the meetings (Ikävalko and Brunila, 2011).

The question that interests us is not whether the efforts of the equality working group members succeeded or what was really ‘achieved’ but rather, how the interviewees speak about the possibilities that GEP can create for feminist actions and how we can conceptualize these possibilities. It is important to note that interviewees may either resist the interview or be over-rehearsed, or even try to give the answers they think the researcher wants to hear. For example, the members of one equality working group led by the principal did not challenge the significance of the GEP during the group interview. In this way, research can be seen as provoking and not representing knowledge (Britzman and Pitt, 2003).

Starting equality work: Between obligation and voluntariness

In the empirical analysis, we, first, look into the ways in which the interviewees rationalize the start of GEP, their own association with it, and we explore the significance of these different rationalizations to feminist resistance. Second, we discuss gender equality working groups as sites and initiators of feminist resistance. Third, we evaluate feminist resistance within GEP processes and the compromises that this entails. Finally, we explore the multiple directions of resistance, including resistance to feminism, and, hence, the paradoxical character of resistance.

In all of the interviews, the legal duty to do GEP was named as the key reason for initiating gender equality work. We call this the bureaucratic mode and suggest that its effects for feminist resistance may be contradictory. For example, in the interview cited below the need to update the GEP document was emphasized as a starting point for the group’s work:

Well, the most important reason (for GEP) is of course the legislation. Obviously, we had the guidelines already, and the legislation required that we must update the plan and that was it. Our starting point was to draw it up substantially in the form the legislation requires. According to enquiries we don’t … The reason to do this was not that we have some problems, it was because of the legislation. (I1, Principal, vocational institution, October 2008)

During the interview the principal highlighted many times that the reason for GEP was not that there were gender equality problems but rather the legal obligation. Different forms of feminist resistance and resistance to feminism can be read from this same interview. From the position of a principal it is typical to deny that there were any problems relating to gender equality at all or that the problems were located somewhere outside the school, for example in the collective labour agreements.

It was also mentioned in the interview that the departments of the educational institution were very gender segregated, meaning that there were departments with male or female teachers only. Their practices and workloads were very variable, which was not considered equal. The problem was constructed as gendered but attributed to the different qualities of men and women: women have more working hours because they were obeying the rules more carefully and men work less with the same salary because they were ‘rationalizing’. In other words, the problem was individualized. GEP was not considered as the right tool for solving this kind of problem because ‘you cannot force people to change’ and it would make things too ‘personal’.

This kind of thinking does not actively resist feminist efforts but does not support them either. This is a very typical way to handle unequal situations in Finland: our intentions are good but we just cannot change things. Finland is often characterized as a legalistic country, where rules and regulations are followed and laws implemented relatively effectively. Feminist research has demonstrated that this is not the case vis-a-vis gender equality legislation, which is easily outright resisted as ‘the world’s worst piece of law’ (Holli et al., 2006) or that discursively moves into the grey zone of a-legitimacy as opposed to being completely illegitimate or legitimate (Nousiainen et al., 2013). In the citation above, the legal obligation acts as a smokescreen for doing the least possible. Because there were not any problems to be solved, changes were not required or seen as necessary. This can be read as resistance to the kind of feminist knowledge that challenges heteronormative power relations. In such interpretations, equality work does not create political subjectivities and subjects become just executors of legislation (cf. Prügl, 2011).

At the same time, what this form of resistance to feminism does is to reduce the goal of equality work to creating a reasonable document and following through the different phases of GEP (cf. Ahmed, 2007; Richardson and Monro, 2012). This can – apart from the formulation of the actual equality plan document – be almost anything. In other words, the effects of GEP as a managerialist technique are not necessarily equivalents to the justifications used to rationalize it (see Foucault, 2002 [1982]). That is to say, the feminist premise of promoting gender equality may get lost because of the bureaucratic mode of the implementation of the goals.

The voluntary nature of the participation is emphasized by an information specialist who worked as a chair of a working group of an upper secondary school:

Information specialist: … told me this is something we should legally have and we talked about it and I just enrolled that I would be interested to run this … on a voluntary basis. And we happen to have, it was not especially systematic but we had [a] very good composition, I think, representatives from different subjects. (I5, upper secondary school, May 2010)

According to this interviewee, the group formed in a rather random way on the basis of voluntary enrolment. She also stated that even though the group was formed on a ‘voluntary basis’, it ‘happened to have’ a good representation of interested people from different fields of expertise. The information specialist – the chair of the group – was also familiar with the processes of GEP because of her previous education in gender studies. Although it can be questioned how ‘voluntary’ the association of a school teacher with bureaucratic obligations is, a working group seems to open up possibilities for obedient subjects to start the equality work in school. And by defining the association with the equality work as voluntary, the interviewees come to give an appearance that feminist resistance is a possibility open for everyone. Yet it is possible to argue that in the terms of biopower, the objectives of the power become part of the subject’s own hopes and desires; they start wanting to do the equality work in the manner of GEP. From this perspective, the feminist resistance does not arise from the subject’s inherent will or freedom but forms as an effect of discursive power relations (Butler, 1997). The need to do equality work in the school becomes part of the subject’s sense of the self and makes it political:

For the teacher in this example, the obligation of GEP was a welcome chance to start equality work at school. She is also the only interviewed teacher who named her work as feminist. This act of naming gender as a perspective that ‘has not got enough attention’ and her viewpoint as feminist can be read as a political statement. It transforms a bureaucratic obligation into a political action.

At the same time, it was obvious that gender equality work is not always greeted with satisfaction by all teachers. To have proper equality work done by an enthusiastic working group is constructed in the data more as a coincidence than as a result of a determined equality policy of the school. As GEP opens up possibilities to validate one’s subjectivity as obedient by satisfying demands of the law/principal, it can also create a risk to become disapproved of or rejected by other teachers who see the demands to change their way of teaching as something that ‘goes too far’. Even though this disapproval of other teachers in the name of their professional autonomy is not usually expressed as resistance to feminism in itself, it may actually function as an effective way to prevent feminist efforts.

In addition to one’s ‘voluntary association’, another way to rationalize the equality work is the notion of ‘common good’. The information specialist quoted above and the science teacher at the same school see equality planning as an opportunity to make changes for the benefit of everyone at school and to solve some existing problems:

The strategy used in this case is to persuade and guide other teachers to see the benefits of equality planning. It is not so much about the question of compulsion but rather about creating solutions in everybody’s interests and about conforming on collective rules (or norms) in order to prevent actions that are ‘all too wild’. As in all development-oriented work, in gender equality work too there is often a temptation to see oneself as an altruistic benefactor whose aim is to act for the benefit of the whole community (cf. Parker, 2007). But this orientation tends to assume that the understanding of the situation and the problems in the workplace are shared and something already known by everyone. To construct feminist claims of the equality work as common good can work as a strategic way to prevent or at least diminish the potential resistance to feminism in advance. On the other hand, the down side of this kind of rationale is that the possible contradictory and resistant features of equality work are silenced.

In addition to biopower, the legislative obligation to GEP can include aspects of disciplinary power as the school and people working there are surrounded by the disciplinary rules/norms of the institution. As Foucault says: ‘Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)’ (Foucault, 1977: 138). This means that the excessively ‘wild’ behaviour must be removed and reckless bodies must be reworked as docile so that the school can function properly. It calls for a somewhat stagnant situation of clear norms and instructions. This requires a governable mentality of a reflexive subject who is able to monitor her own behaviour and obeys the rules (cf. Rose, 1999). On the other hand, as the strong equality discourse has made gender equality a national attribute, it is constantly repeated (and also criticized) in the public discourses of education. That is why the importance of equality work cannot be reduced to its obligatory nature.

The legislation brings about support for feminist activism and its claims. It raises feminist demands up to the level of legality and in so doing modifies activism into the form of GEP and obeying the law. The obligations of GEP bring about actions of a subject who is in one way or another familiar with the problematizing of gender and reinforces the recognition of gendered power relations as a (political) problem needing intervention. It gives the form and the medium for feminist action.

At the same time, the members of the equality working group are yearning for recognition for their work and their knowledge about persisting inequalities (Davies, 2006). This raises the questions: which knowledges are recognized as feminist and which not? On the one hand, if the working group’s aim is to follow through the equality planning process and not to take notice of resisting voices in school, one can ask whether such actions can be read as feminist. On the other hand, it may not be possible to separate feminist political activism from responsible subjectivity in general. Some actors may not want to be recognized as feminist but as altruistic subjects or just as good employees.

A sense of community as a route to feminist resistance

Gender equality working groups’ official task is usually to draw up an equality plan and coordinate its implementation. In addition to this, the group can have important effects relative to feminist resistance. It can become the place for the resistance to arise and take shape and more importantly, the sense of community can work as a form of resistance in itself. For example, the language teacher constructed the meaning of equality work for teachers involved as the ‘thing of their own’. According to her, some students, partly because of the influence of their friends, also become enthusiastic about equality work:

Well, the students, umm. There was one … A kind of a quota-student, someone from the student council was obliged to join the team. She got very interested in this, the word spread and her friends started to come too. We had a magnificent team last spring and autumn, we had seven students altogether. … It was a nice coincidence that a certain group of friends became enthusiastic about this.

The teacher carries on by highlighting the group’s good cooperation and mutual understanding:

It was really fulfilling to have those conversations with them [the students]. As a matter of fact, those were the most rewarding moments in the team when we just talked about this kind of. … What kind of expectations girls have nowadays and so on. (I3, upper secondary school, April 2009)

In addition to new opportunities for influence, the working group offered a way to find others interested in equality work at school. In this way, the group can create a platform for discussions about shared interests, for cooperation and support. The group makes it possible to adopt feminist discourses of listening and discussion about experiences of the students and teachers in different positions at school. These spatial and temporal practices of mutual discussions and efforts to receive and give recognition to the views of the others (Butler, 1997; Davies, 2006) without limited and fixed agendas, guidelines or timetables, can be read as feminist counter-forces to managerialist (and governance feminist) discourses of efficiency and distribution of work.

As previous studies have shown, working with students and discussions with them may represent the most rewarding part of equality work for teachers (Ikävalko, 2010). It is, however, important to remember that while liberal discourses of democracy and equality are well supported in educational institutions (e.g. Jones, 2004) and in GEP work (Ikävalko, 2013), the power relations among group members are not necessarily discussed or vanish during the group’s work. While the group’s work can generate new expressions for feminist resistance, it does not mean that the group members can step outside of all power relations of the school. The resistance against gendered inequality may occur in the group but this does not necessarily undermine the leading position of teachers in the group. As for example Allison Jones (2004: 58–59) has pointed out, inequality is not something to be reduced by dialogue and it cannot easily be released from social inequalities that impact upon the possibilities of shared talk. It is, of course, the case that the principal and teachers make the final decisions concerning the changes achieved with the help of GEP. As Jones (2004) argues, sharing the thoughts does not remove power relations in school. Even if the power relations do not disappear, however, they may change their form so that instead of unilateral speech, dialogue becomes important, and instead of goal-oriented rationality, open ended discussions are emphasized. At the same time, it is important to understand that because such actions take place within existing structures, anything genuinely radical may not be possible. Action that emphasizes dialogue generates an impression of change although nothing transforms in power relations.

Feminist resistance as simultaneous mastery and submission

Next we turn to analysing some concrete feminist actions and resistance to gendered practices in the context of GEP. In the following example, the language teacher describes the equality working group’s efforts to influence the unequal distribution of work among teachers. The group had found out that there were certain subjects where young female teachers did not get full hours (and did not therefore get a full salary) because a senior male teacher had taken so much overtime work for himself. That was something they wanted to intervene in and they also had the support of the school’s directors for it. As the teacher described, the group had ‘quite a memorable comment concerning the situation in the teachers meeting’ that ‘hit a very sore point’ in the school and among teachers in general.

Even though the teacher considered the work done by the equality working group as feminist, it was easier for the group to present the problem of division of working hours in gender neutral terms from the perspective of ‘professional experience, position and chemistry between people’ even though the gendered nature of the issue was ‘quite obvious’, as the interviewed teacher puts it. This is yet another prime example of working within existing power structures. The teacher describes the preparations the group made and what happened in the teacher meeting:

We read the group’s statement as an act of feminist resistance, as its aim was to change inequalities in a way which combines (liberal feminist) statistical argumentation required by the gender equality legislation and (radical feminist) collaboration, a kind of ‘power from the group’ mentality. From the point of view of subjectification, the group’s statement, the courage it required and the limited discussion afterwards place the demands on the individual, on the members of the working group. The individualizing power forms the subject’s conception of the self as the resistance is said to come from inside of an individual, and not as an opportunity offered by the gender equality work.

For the group, collecting statistical data was a way of affirmation and a way to demonstrate the validity of their arguments. Statistical data can be read as an acceptance of the positivist and managerial forms of knowledge. Indeed, it is the liberal feminist form of knowledge that GEP requires. It invites understanding of gender as binary oppositions (women and men) and equality work as removing discriminatory practices as opposed to a wider challenge to gendered power structures (Ikävalko and Brunila, 2011; Prügl, 2011). However, collecting and using statistical data as a way to make a point can also be read as a form of feminist resistance available in the context of GEP and as an example of the subjects’ simultaneous submission to and mastery of the discursive power (Butler, 1997; Davies, 2006). The mastery of liberal feminist discourse and use of statistical data can give possibilities for working group members to be heard, but at the same time it makes them responsible to assure the others of the existence of gendered inequalities in a very limited – quantitative and partly gender neutral – way.

As the teacher points out, silence does not mean that nothing happened during the meeting. Even though the group’s orientation is conformist and they did not want to redefine the problem of the working hours as a feminist issue or cause any conflict among teachers, the statistical data helped to construct the problem as gendered. Later on, the work of the group generated more discussion about equality in school in general: ‘equality has been taken up quite a lot in teachers’ meetings, it has become a sort of value in itself’, the teacher told us. From the point of view of feminist resistance, the group’s work created new possibilities to understand school practices as gendered.

Inside and outside at the same time: Paradoxes of feminist resistance

As noted earlier, when analysing the actions of feminist resistance in the context of GEP, the resistance to these actions is not separable from the analysis. On the contrary, the different kinds of resistances are in many cases intersecting and simultaneous. In the following excerpt, the interviewed members of the equality working group describe a visit of a colleague from another upper secondary school to a teachers’ meeting. The visiting teacher was there to share some experiences about GEP and to describe the measures set down as necessary in her school. Some of the teachers who were not members of the equality working group found the measures exaggerated:

The example indicates the possibilities and limits of feminist resistance. The visiting teacher’s talk can be interpreted as a form of feminist resistance as she produced new meanings and goals for GEP. The construction of them as exaggeration can, in turn, be seen as a countermove to this resistance. This also suggests that knowledge about GEP is not easily transferred from one context to another (see Ahmed, 2012).

The working group members, however, took a different view from their colleagues and for them the issues in the fellow school’s equality plan did not appear as exaggerated demands. As obedient subjects of equality work, they regarded it as their duty to convince those resisting teachers of the benefits of GEP and ‘to market’ the issue in an appealing way. The members of the working group came to represent the position of ‘the knower’ and had the expertise to define the ‘interests’ of the whole school. Instead of listening to different viewpoints, their task becomes to change the opinions of the opposing teachers and to resist their resistance, so to speak. At the same time, this can be read as an attempt to resist the GEP process being reduced to something that produced just ‘a paper for paper’ (cf. Ahmed, 2007) but rather offer novel ways to think about gender and power, which could, in turn, transform gendered power structures.

The two examples above indicate the multidirectional resistances that may occur when trying to change the power relations with the help of gender equality work instead of just producing general guidelines and statements. While it is possible with the help of GEP to make – in some cases very simple – feminist suggestions to change unequal practices of the school, it is not necessarily enough to create a discursive shift in the conceptions of gender or equality. That is why the feminist demands can seem somewhat irrelevant or unconnected to the daily work.

During the interview with the language teacher quoted above, the drafting of an actual equality plan document did not become a central theme. Discussions in the group and the actions it took were more important. The document was just some paper the chair of the group wrote. Even though the teacher sees GEP as an important way to make inequalities visible, she reckoned that other teachers may not be interested in the content of the gender equality document:

This separateness of the actions of the working group and the equality plan document expressed by the researcher and the teacher tells us something about the power relations intertwined with GEP and the paradoxical position of feminist resistance in the school. If the responsibility of implementation of equality plans is not shared, the work is reduced to a bureaucratic document. It seems that in this case the group and its work are separate from the everyday work of the school. The paradox is that this separateness can give the (feminist) subjects a sense of autonomy and resistance and at the same time keep them and gender equality work excluded from school practices they should have an effect on. As Bronwyn Davies et al. (2001: 179), referring to Butler (1995), point out, ‘the achievement of autonomy is based on an illusion of separateness from a system from which she can never float free. … Yet, her dependence, combined with a moment of exclusion and differentiation, may well lead to a recognition of herself as autonomous, which blots out, for the moment, the relations of power in which and on which she is dependent.’

Conclusions

In this article, our aim has been to focus on feminist resistance and resistance to feminism within the processes of gender equality planning in Finland. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of power and resistance, we set out to explore what sites and spaces there were for feminist resistance. At the same time, we recognized that feminist resistance is always intertwined with and generates resistance to feminism.

Our discursive reading of the research material showed that the bureaucratic mode shaped the initiation and functioning of gender equality working groups in the educational institutions. The participating teachers oscillated between obligation and voluntariness to join these processes. Obligation generated a form of resistance to feminism: this is a duty and there are no real gender equality problems to be tackled or solved via these processes. Voluntariness, in turn, represented feminist resistance as open to everyone, masking power relations in a sense that might not be possible for everyone to join. We also find feminist resistance highly contradictory in its effects. We detected a familiar pressure to frame advancing gender equality as a ‘common good’. Its effect in terms of resistance was to silence opposing or different voices in advance. Hence feminist resistance is always in relation to its other, resistance to feminism, itself pre-empting it with silencing actions such as these.

Working against the individualism of neoliberal discourses, GEP and the working groups established to implement it offered sites for feminist resistance in the form of a sense of community. These were the most rewarding moments for the interviewed teachers. Jointly, the need to ‘produce the paper’ (the gender equality plan) was put aside and new knowledge was generated and shared through free discussions. We interpret the group’s cooperation as feminist resistance to managerialist practices in gender equality work that attach the activity to the individual. In the group, subjects become something more than just leaders, quota students or teacher representatives At the same time, this way of framing feminist resistance also had the tendency to hide power relations, for example between teachers and the principal; the teachers and students; between students; and between teachers. Therefore the key argument of our analysis is, that in spite of equality work, the power relations of the school do not vanish but they transform and perhaps take occasionally less hierarchical forms through joint discussions in equality working groups.

When looking at our findings about resistance to feminism we found mostly silence; silence as refusal to engage with concrete attempts to change unequal practices. When resistance to feminism was articulated aloud, as in the case of the teacher visiting from the other institution, those involved in GEP felt obliged to resist this, resist resistance. We read this as a difficulty to deal with resistance. In many cases it is not easy for the working group to achieve changes in the ways that gender equality is understood among staff members. This is also the reason why the actual document of GEP may remain distant for the people outside the working group. The paradox of feminist resistance in the context of GEP is that while the separateness of the working group may give a sense of autonomy for its members, it keeps the feminist demands unconnected from the everyday work of the school.

We conclude that GEP does offer sites for feminist resistance to neoliberal forms of governance. At the same time, we conclude that feminist resistance is always contradictory and always in relation to resistance to its actions and articulations that can be read as resistance to feminism. The relationship between feminist practices and resistance towards them is not dialectical but multidirectional. There are no guarantees for the emergence of such activities and their taking place is situated and incidental.