Gender troubling critical whiteness studies in education

Gender is gaining more attention as a category of analysis in educational scholarship; however, much misunderstanding of gender remains, especially in how sex and gender are often treated as synonymous analytics. Additionally, gender and race are often treated as wholly separate despite their ongoing entwined epistemic and ontological genealogies. While critical studies of whiteness hold the potential to interrogate how gender itself is a violent imposition of white supremacy (Ozias & Nicolazzo, 2021; Spillers, 1987), the present study uncovers substantively different findings. Specifically, our content analysis of the past decade of CwS literature in higher education demonstrates what we identify as an investment in technologies of whiteness; a commitment that reinforces reductive, harmful, and inaccurate knowledge/power regimes of race/gender. In doing so, much of the CwS scholarship (including our own) undermines its intended goals by furthering, rather than dismantling, the effects of white cisheteropatriarchy.