Introduction
In their 2009 paper, ‘Gender/ed discourses and emotional sub-texts: theorising emotion in UK higher education’, Leathwood and Hey claim that much as ‘there has been an increasing interest in the place of emotion in higher education in recent years’, there has also been ‘an indifference to the affective domain and an allegiance to the education of the rational autonomous subject and public citizen[...]at the heart of formal education’ (2009, p. 429). Leathwood and Hey also identify the dualism of emotion/rationalism with gender roles: women are generally equated with the former, men with the latter. This historical equation of women with the affective is one that has been established and argued over through religious, philosophical, political and social discourses. This paper will seek to establish the grounds for the dualistic approach that has forged gender relations and the ways in which writers and thinkers have sought to thwart this dualism. It will then consider, if we accept this perceived dualism as (un)avoidable, what the implications are, in the first place, for education and, in the second, for e-learning:
Gender
Gender, emotion and e-learning
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