Book / video reviews
* Note: download more book reviews at our website - www.msvu.ca/atlantis/vol 33.2

Powerful Subjects: Are Women Really Taking Over the University? Jocey Quinn. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling, USA: Trentham Books, 2003; x + 168 pages; ISBN 1 85856 279 1; $29.95US (paper).
In Powerful Subjects, Jocey Quinn discusses a research project in which she examined claims that feminism and the expanded female presence in universities and colleges has resulted in female dom ination of formerly masculine space. Her project was in response to widespread claim s that education has become feminized. Quinn found that far from being fem inized spaces, the institutions she studied were uncomfortable for many female students; that being a majority within a student body does not necessarily make female students "powerful subjects."
Quinn's research was done in Britain, where post-secondary institutions are different enough from those of Canada that her research results cannot be directly superim posed. But it is not difficult for the Canadian reader to im agine ways in which Quinn's results might apply to Canadian institutions, and her solid literature review and bibliography will be useful to people interested in this topic.
Quinn examined the experiences of twenty-one female students in two British post-secondary institutions: one a college and one a relatively new university. She studied students in two different subject areas, neither of them male dominated. W hile she tried to get a cross section of ages and conditions of life, her study subjects were less racially and ethnically diverse than one might expect to find in sim ilar institutions in urban Canada.
Quinn's study results place into question the presumption that feminism and the presence of wom en in post-secondary education have affected course content and m odes of teaching. Explicitly fem inist discourse was largely absent in these institutions, even in a class dealing with

feminist issues. Fem inist pedagogy was a non-issue, male students still tended to dom inate classroom s, fem ale students still felt uncertain of their place. Quinn found that while her subjects were thoughtful, they were not powerful, neither in their self-perceptions nor in the objective circum stance of their classroom and other institutional experiences.
This work has some real lim itations. Not all readers will agree with Quinn's theoretical and ideological assum ptions about what "feminist" and "feminist pedagogy" m ean. The sm all sample size and restricted locales lim it the general applicability of her research results. Yet despite these lim itations, readers who are concerned about the place of women in institutions of higher education will find this work useful. Quinn demonstrates some of the ways and some of the reasons why, for all the changes that have taken place in post-secondary education, and despite a vast increase in the presence of women as university students and faculty, women are still far from being powerful subjects within these institutions.
Alison Hayford University of Regina