Usual suspects: experience, reflection and the (en) gendering of knowledge

Abstract

Much attention in adult learning theory rests on the distinction between ‘experience’ and ‘reflection’, with experience treated as the raw material for learning and reflection as a highly cognitive processing stage in which the learning actually takes place. The distinction thus valorizes emotional detachment, physical distance and rationality, thereby imposing an epistemological hierarchy that is deeply complicitous with power differentials of gender, class and race. This article locates the concept of reflection within the gendered dualisms of Western philosophy and their historically produced understandings of the relationship between experience and thought. I first examine how our notions of reflection deploy theories of knowledge and the state that took shape during the Enlightenment and, second, situate them within a politics of vision closely related to the rise of the middle class. In exploring this necessarily truncated history, I suggest that our notions of reflection internalize relationships of ruling. Some parts of the self, such as emotion and the body, are portrayed as unreliable and dangerous; reason's task is therefore both interrogatory and managerial, reproducing implicit matrices of sovereignty and control.