Reading, Writing and Resistance: Feminist and Neoliberal Subjects in the Canadian Academy

Feminism has a short but important history within the Canadian academy, one whose future is put at risk by the increasing corporatization of the university. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the production of female subjectivities in the university by exploring emergent modes of feminist resistance within and against the neoliberalization of the Canadian academy. Against this backdrop, and through analysis of three case studies drawn from the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, my thesis examines and theorizes three pairs of contrasting female subjectivities within the neoliberal academy: the professionalized female academic versus the feminist academic; the entrepreneurial female student versus the indebted student; and the self-securitized woman versus the autonomous woman. Through the investigation of the resistant subjectivities in each of these couplets, I argue that it is integral for feminist movements on campus to combine a critique of patriarchy with a critique of the neoliberal university.