Terror(ism) in the Classroom: The Queer Pedagogy of Affect

• In Event: Everyday Scenes and Affective Intensities

Abstract

Evoking what Love (2007) deems “feeling backward” (p.4), in this paper I enact a “turning back” (Gordon, 1999) to a classroom event in 2006. Part of a larger empirical study on censorship events in US secondary classrooms, this study draws on interview data and autoethnographic work to explore the affective fervor that ensued when a Muslim woman’s pleasure in lesbian erotica was censored in a NYC public school. Rather than a celebration of subversion or utopic stake in the future, this piece seeks to stymie the progress-oriented “panoptimism” (p. 280) that Lesko and Talburt (2012) see suffusing research on youth—particularly queer youth (Talburt, 2010; Talburt and Rasmussen 2010)—and to dwell in the complex temporalities Talburt and Rasmussen (2010) call for in “after-queer” research.

Towards this end, I conceptualize this ‘event’ within a Deleuzian (1990) framework as a confluence of forces (Stagoll, 2010, p. 89) and affects (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Affect theory may be a particularly apt intervention in queer educational studies since as Puar (2007) writes, “affective analyses can approach queernesses that are unknown or not cogently knowable, that are in the midst of becoming, that do not immediately and visibly signal themselves as insurgent, oppositional, or transcendent” (p.204). Traversing a range of bodies (human, material as well as ideational), affects tap simultaneously into intensely localized energies and larger geopolitical forces. I see affective events as oft-overlooked “non-diegetic moments” in classrooms, a term lifted from cinematic studies to signal instances that are “part of the actual film text but not part of the plot or narrative” (Muñoz, 2000, p.77). I conceptualize these as non-diegetic pedagogies, learning modes that are not part of stable, narrativizable or linear curricular ‘plots,’ but nonetheless move classroom bodies.

In this particular event, a queer Muslim body was constructed, administered and ‘corrected’ within a NYC public school invoking tactics of the War on Terror to surveil, detain and target particular bodies. Puar and Rai (2002) and Puar (2007) have argued that gender and sexuality are central to these projects and that the wake of 9/11 has seen “an aggressive heterosexual patriotism” where the conflation “monster-terrorist-fag” (Puar and Rai, 2002, p.117) is pinned on Islamic bodies deemed threatening. I argue that this student invoked the specter of this terrorist body and became a target of censorship and controversy. Yet rather than the disciplinary act reinstating the official (national) curriculum, it unleashed a battery of unwieldy affects. A form of queer pedagogy, these affects traversed and perturbed a wide range of bodies, both human and epistemological, and destabilized the security sought in stable forms of knowledge and identity. Engendering what Muñoz (2000) calls “affective excess,” the result was a series of disidentifications in both students and staff producing subjects “who [could] not be contained within the sparse affective landscape of Anglo North America” (p.70). Attending to affect in education may help us attend to the ways bodies continually affect and are affected by each other and how futures unfold queerly into the past.

Author

• Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University