Masculinities and Femininities in the Mexican Secundaria: Notes Toward an Institutional Practice of Gender Equity

2Feminist researchers of education in Latin America have frequently found their best efforts to achieve gender parity vexed by the intransigence of deeply rooted gender ideologies. In the introduction to her oft-cited volume, Stromquist (1992:4-5) notes that progressive educational changes, such as increased women’s enrollments across all levels of schooling, or a gender-neutral overt curriculum, may be offset by the practices of a hidden curriculum informed by the negative social markings of gender. Women may thus be entering schools in greater numbers, and they may be faced with less obvious forms of institutional marginalization, only to encounter the obstacles of subtle and pervasive discrimination. Ironically, the greater influx of women into education and the workforce may not substantially alter the social and political arrangements which continue to subordinate them. In a more recent address, Stromquist (1995:452) emphasizes the need to examine and challenge the “ideological mechanisms ” in schools which stifle both students’ questioning of such arrangements and the imagining of alternatives. There is in this formulation a common assumption that teachers, textbooks, and administrators—thos