While women’s participation in the national economic growth is seen as critical to sustainable
development, women’s underrepresentation in Cameroon’s higher institutions, such as École
Nationale Superieure Polytechnique (ENSP), tasked with training human capacity contradicts
such development discourses. Despite calls to provide equal educational opportunities for
women to enable their acquisition of the skills needed to compete in the global labor market,
females in Cameroon too often lack access to girl-friendly, safe, and supportive spaces in formal
schools largely due to patriarchal traditions which restrict women’s roles in the society. Most
recently, females in Cameroon have sought entrance into ENSP, which has historically prepared
male technocrats to serve in the government and private industry. While the institution has
opened limited spaces for women, it continues to discursively constitute them as “outsiders
within” as women venture into traditional environments and participate in activities from which
they have been expressly or tacitly excluded.
My dissertation thus uses ENSP as a space to examine how the discourses of gendered education
come to be defined and practiced. Through analysis of institutional discourses, archival
documents, and interviews with staff and students at ENSP, it investigates the conflicting
narratives in gendered constructions. Paying attention to institutional texts and individual
utterances, the dissertation illustrates the complexities of intimate relationships and highlights the
processes of contestation that are so crucial in shaping contemporary, gendered identities. While
I underscore the importance of an approach that permits the exploration of the ambiguities of
gendered identities, I also present identifications and relationships as imagined and performed in
discursive practices. To track the complexity of the process, my analysis includes the ways in
which education discourses shape and constrain our understanding and engagement in the world
and how gendered beings come to understand themselves and their given situation. While global,
national, and local interests shape and structure student efforts at ENSP, the process of becoming
an engineer is full of contradictions, tensions, and struggles, thereby leaving open the possibility
that female students might take on new roles and behaviors that are deemed contrary to their
identities. The dissertation thus situates the current interest in women in Math, Science, and
Technology in relation to contemporary and historical definitions and underscores the shifts in
education thinking. It lays out the different perspectives held by different social actors to
advance a more nuanced understanding of the education practices through which gender is being
framed, constructed, contested, and negotiated. It also presents the approaches of ethnography
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and critical discourse analysis used and employs critical discourse analysis to tease the different
subjectivities and power relations at this site. In examining the status quo and patriarchal
dominance in the exercise of power against female subservience and determination, I also
underscore how female voices challenge the social constructs that define them as 'others' and
‘outsiders’ and how they strategically negotiate their identities using the discourses of schooling.
This study thus illuminates the ways in which institutional and individual discourses confirm
existing social relationships and behaviors while at the same time introducing new meanings and
patterns of being and conflicting enactments of gender within the production of linguistic forms.