In educational discourses, postmodernist theorizing has cast doubt on the monolithic claims of latter-day critical theorists to be able to identify the ideological underpinnings of oppressive pedagogies, and, from a safe distance therefore, to restructure educational environments in such a manner as to realize the goals of their "libratory" or "emancipatory" projects.

In 1991, we co-created and co-taught a Women's Studies undergraduate course at the University of British Columbia entitled, "Lesbian Subjects Matter: Feminism/s From the Margins?" (16). We chose to focus on two major themes in constructing the course, representation and identity. These themes generated two central questions: first, whether the claiming of cultural representation and voice necessarily entails the inevitability of essentialism; second, whether the politics of identity, especially an identity constructed "on the margins," could be a viable strategy, either theoretically or politically.

We arranged for student access to, and instruction in, the use of a range of technologies in video production, photography, desktop publishing, and the like and encouraged them to make use of non-textual media for some part of their course work. This was in order to reconstruct the typically limited opportunities for both access to, and production of, non-stereotypic representations of lesbian identities and cultures. The students were asked to do a project, either individually or collaboratively, exploring some aspect of lesbian identity/representation and making use of any available technology. The curriculum included a wide range of kinds of presenters and texts, our purpose being to engage students with the ways in which the sliding signifier "lesbian" would be differently constructed as a function of age, ethnicity, race, class, body size, and other key axes that could/do function as sites for "systems of domination" (as bell hooks describes the inter-locking forces of oppression).

For many participants in the course, the specific libratory contribution of technology was the provision of the means for (a) reconstructing the division of labour in classroom tasks that are historically assigned to, and completed by, individual students, (b) restructuring power relations between participants in educational contexts who typically occupy very unevenly positioned discursive roles in relation to power and (c) transforming received knowledge's, texts, and images through ironic acts of mis/representation, mimicry, collage, montage, and re/degendering.

What we saw in much of the work created by the students were examples of "politically articulate" uses of technologies of cultural production characteristic of postmodernism; specifically, postmodernist practices of "recycling" which salvage icons, images and artifacts from within their original socio-historical context, and re-insert them into another, where the "detritus" can take on anew, significantly greater cultural value. Correspondingly, postmodern pedagogies can find videos, photographs, posters, and paper dolls capable of articulating sophisticated and complex theory, while formal essays and conventional book reviews may be relegated to the margins. Inversion indeed!