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The term performance - a temporary and active presentation, expression, or act - has a presence in all cultural media and genres, and has repercussions for taking on, experiencing, and enacting an identity as well. Performance reaches beyond theatre, ballet and music to any human behaviour that is constantly performed through personal acts that contradict stereotypes - not just with regard to gender, but equally so with regard to class and ethnicity or race. The theme Gender and Performance focuses upon the performative strength of gender through various media: feminist and political theatre, an online 'private' novel turned radio play, protest movements, internet beauty blogs, dressing and fashion and the performativity of the word slut. Gender and performativity will take the reader to the Netherlands, Austria, Canada, Mexico and the Philippines

Numerous Czech studies have been conducted on how the education system reproduces inequalities. While most of them have dealt with the reproduction of class inequalities, relatively few have focused on the reproduction of gender inequalities. In this article, the authors apply a conceptual understanding of the category of gender to research on education, an approach that avoids both universalising the category of woman, as well as the opposite extreme of individualisation. We claim that female students, even though they differ among themselves in various social and personal ways, are serialised as women by institutions in the education system. They are expected to perform differently, with different motivations, their performance is valued differently and they are expected to follow different professions than male students. The paper focuses in detail on the gendered nature of educational institutions, both in terms of the gender segregation of fi elds and levels of study, as well as in terms of the importance of the interaction that occurs during the processes of teaching and ascribing value and significance to the performance of male and female students. The authors argue that education, generally expected to function as a social ladder and a route to better-paid jobs in the labour market, serves men and women in segregated ways.