What is really going on in such "learning" situations must be understood as first and foremost an acquiescence to a highly stratified, hierarchical and punitively enforced set of social relations, relations enforced as much by classroom teachers and by parents themselves, as by the particular male students who enact the prohibitions, the violence and the punishments. As many women students will attest, the price of competence is just too high, and the risks of success far too great, to permit oneself to "master" gender-anomalous learning tasks. And this notwithstanding a host of new policies, programs, initiatives addressing female "phobias" of new and varied kinds. Where does this all get us?

It is high time we had the courage to look at how and why women and girls are actively being prevented from developing competence, and recognize that there has been for too many years now an active war being waged on women. It is high time we took into our own hands the very weaponry which has been deployed against us, and taught each other, guerilla fashion, its uses. And it is high time we acknowledged the brutal fact that no one else will do this for us, and explicitly acknowledged that this is because to develop competence at all, but most especially to develop competence in relation to high-status technologies, is to violate the unwritten law of gender. We can no longer separate off the knowledge/skills to be learned from the social relations which shape and constrain-and for women, severely limit-the actual material practices of teaching and learning.

Mary Bryson teaches in the Faculty of Eduction at the University of British Columbia, where both her department and her Dean have tried, vigorously, to eliminate her queer presence via the "tenure process" (unsuccessfully). She wishes she were a member of the Lesbian Avengers. Suzanne de Castell teaches in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She hates writing biographical statements. She cares for one dog, three cats, and about a hundred Japanese Koi, with Mary. This article is a significantly abbreviated and adapted version of a chapter (forthcoming) in J. Willinsky and J. Gaskell, (eds.) Gender In/forms Curriculum: From Enrichment to Transformation, Teachers College Press.

1. See Benston (1993) "A new technology but the same old story," Canadian Women's Studies, 13(2),68-81; Cockburn, C. (1985) Machinery of Dominance, London: Pluto Press; Cowan, R. (1989). More work for Mother. London: Free Association Books; Edwards, P. (1990) "The army and the microworld: Computers and the politics of gender identity," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16, 102-127; Hacker, S. (1989). Pleasure, power and technology. Boston: Unwin; Hartouni, V. (1991) "Reproductive discourses in the 1980s," in C. Penley & A. Ross (eds.), Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Rothschild, J., ed. (1983) Machina Ex Dea, New York: Pergammon Press; and Wajcman, J. (1991). Feminism confronts technology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
   
   
2. For examples, see Perry and Greber, L. (1990) "Women and Computers: An introduction," Signs:, 16,74-101.
   
   
3. Time magazine named the computer "Man of the Year." As a past Director of Educational Marketing for Apple Computers affirmed, "The buyers of Apple computers are 98% male. We do not feel that women represent any great untapped audience" (cited in Sanders, J. (1985) "Making the computer neuter," The Computing Teacher, April, p.23).
   
   
4. Sutton, R. (1991). "Equity and computers in the schools: A decade of research," Review of Educational Research, 61, 475-503.
   
   
5. For comprehensive summaries of these findings, see Becker, H. (1986). "Our national report card: Preliminary results from the new John's Hopkin's survey," Classroom Computer Learning, 6, 30-33; Ragsdale, R. (1988). Permissable computing in education: Values, assumptions, and needs. New York: Praeger; Sanders, J., & Stone, A. (1986). The neuter computer: Computers for girls and boys. New York: Neal-Schuman; and Sutton, 1991.