Abstract

In this chapter, I draw on Michel Foucault to explain the mechanisms of marginalization of women from working-class origins in academic institutions in the context of the U.S.A. Next, I explain how the discursive construction of the working classes as “the Other” in academic knowledge production is part of a disciplinary power that functions to keep women from working-class origins either out or at the margins of academic institutions. In academic institutions, disciplinary power aims to discipline the bodies and minds of working-class women into the norm of bourgeois and male subjectivity. Finally, I suggest strategies that counter gender and class disciplining in academia.