A Bourdieusian Analysis of Intersectionality In Ontario’s Community College System

The main focus of my dissertation is a detailed investigation of how gender and race intersect in the Province’s community college administrations thereby creating marginalized and oppressive social structures. My original contribution to knowledge addresses the daily lived experiences of gender performativity, white patriarchy and racial discrimination in the managerial sector of the Ontario college system. The theoretical foundation is based upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and the scholarship of several prominent feminist theorists, including Kate Huppatz, Lois McNay, Patricia Hill Collins and Judith Butler. Each of them critically expands upon Bourdieu’s concepts to focus on intersectional inequality, specific examples of which are found in the Province’s college middle management sector. This thesis deploys feminist Bourdieusian concepts, such as social and gender capital, to highlight gender and racial power in the matrix of symbolic domination that is situated in the Province’s colleges. It also directs attention to social practices of self empowerment to counter and resist the negative aspects of gender capital and racial hegemony. \nThe mutually constitutive social dimensions of the college bureaucracy have never been the topic of such detailed and extensive research. No prior, published investigations exist that examine the Provincial community college system over issues related to whether and how individuals utilize gender capital to negotiate hierarchical positionality or contend with intersectional disadvantage. My findings document a systemically gendered and racialized work environment. Some middle managers purport to advance their careers by dominating others in the workplace. However, in response, there are others who demonstrate a form of proactive resistance to what they characterize as discriminatory institutional regimes of neoliberal patriarchy and white privilege. They do so through strategic practices designed to navigate the hidden, intersubjective contours and oppressive consequences of gender and racial inequality. My findings illustrate the broad social dimensions of these behaviours and the manner in which they are played out in the social field of Ontario’s community college system. \nUsing a sequential, mixed methods approach to data acquisition, my work focuses on whether agents experience networks of power differently because of the impact of systemic inequality and how they choose to respond to resulting workplace marginalization. I argue that organizationally ensconced diversity policies fail to neutralize the intersectional struggles that are endlessly reproduced in dominant workplace social networks. “One-size-fits-all” policies, even with the imprimatur of law, fail to rout and neuter historical influences of white privilege and patriarchy. This failure negatively impacts subjective identities in the complex relationship between the individual, and the objective structure comprising the middle management field of practice. The findings of this study demonstrate how inequalities are sustained and reproduced cogeneratively because of unremedied gender and racial discrimination in the Province’s community colleges. My study brings to light an awareness of these intersecting oppressions and illuminates the implicit deficiencies of the institutional diversity rhetoric in Ontario. Ultimately, it brings into sharper focus the lived experiences of social inequity amid the naturalization of patriarchy and white privilege.

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