Educating Bodies in the Ideological Apparatuses of the Age of Neoliberal Globalization

Postmodern and post-structural theories on education highlight education as a “discursive space that involves asymmetrical relations of power where both dominant and subordinate groups are engaged in struggles over the production, legitimation, and circulation of particular forms of meaning and experience (Erevelles, 2000, pg. 30). As such, postmodern and post-structural theorists “examine the discursive practices by which [(individual)] student subjectivity (as intersectionally constructed by race, class, gender, and sexuality) is produced, regulated, and even resisted within the social context of schooling in post-industrial times” (Erevelles, 2000, pg. 25). This latter view is juxtaposed against structural theorists who view education as an ideological apparatus for bourgeois domination in capitalist relations of production (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Althusser, 1980). In this work, I argue that the former position is not an alternative to the latter. But represents an aspect of the former. That is, education in the age of neoliberal (postindustrial) globalization serves as an ideological apparatus for bourgeois domination through the identity politics of postmodernism and post structuralism.

Keywords: Ideological domination, Intersectionality, embourgeoisement, black Underclass, black bourgeoisie, social class language game, dialectic, antidialectic.