Gendered pedagogic identities and academic professionalism in Greek medical schools

Feminist scholarship has considered how pedagogical identities and emotions are implicated in the gender politics of belonging and othering in higher education. This paper examines how gendered and embodied pedagogy is mobilised in Greek medical schools to construct notions of the ideal academic and assert women’s position women in Academic Medicine. I employ thematic analysis to illustrate that formations of pedagogy and academic professionalism are bound up with emotions and embodied practices of relating, connecting, creating learning communities and promoting virtuous academic citizenship. Women’s gendered accounts of pedagogy and their boundary practices of identification demonstrate agency, intentionality and operate as highly political actions of legitimacy and resistance within the patriarchal realm of Greek higher education. I argue that gendered discourses of pedagogy in Greek medical schools become resources for resisting neo-liberal notions of academic work, individualism and women’s exclusion in the highly prestigious discipline of academic medicine in Greece.