Unhappiness, Teaching, Queers

• In Event: Everyday Scenes and Affective Intensities

Abstract

This inquiry begins with Sara Ahmed’s claim that “happiness shapes what coheres as a world” (2010, p. 2) and explores how queer students and issues are associated with teacher unhappiness. Success-oriented teachers became angry, subdued, self-censoring, and self-policing when discussing incidents around sexual minority students and school dispositions.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology
Feminist cultural studies of affect ground this presentation. Ahmed (2010), in particular, explores “how feelings are attributed to objects, such that some things and not others become happiness and unhappiness causes” (p. 14), and she notes that ”’unhappiness’ was first used to describe those who cause misfortune or trouble rather than those who feel sad or wretched” (p. 95). Queer lives and queer students seem to be “unhappy objects,” and this association has implications for teachers’ proximity to them.
The data are drawn from focus groups and an online survey, collected in 2012-2013, and part of a larger study of beginning teachers and LGBTQ issues. The analysis prioritizes the interpretive approaches of Ahmed (2010) and Flatley (2008). Ahmed adopts an ethnographic orientation to affect; in studying happiness, she wrote, “I follow the word happiness around. I notice what it is up to, where it goes, who or what it gets associated with” (p. 14). Flatley (2008) places affects within a socio-historical context and theorizes that normative affects operate as a mood, or disposition, that facilitates (or not) memories, considerations, and responses. Moods influence affective orientations and make ideas and actions possible. Our analysis attends to happiness/unhappiness and to school moods in relation to sexual minorities.

Interpretations
The analysis describes both the loud anger over homophobic schools and the quieter expressions of trepidation and self-questioning. An initial sorrowfulness of focus group participants in relation to LGBT sexuality in schools was marked. Queer students, associated with low self-esteem, bullying, violence, and homelessness, were vexing. The affect lightened somewhat as teachers heard their views echoed by others. In discussing how they might respond to school-based scenarios, participants began to question themselves, wondering if talking with their students about their own heterosexual relationships was a good idea and if they were “qualified” to talk about sexual minority issues. We interpret the desires to be a good teacher as simultaneously recognizing queer sexualities in school and also distancing them as too troubling. Our presentation will describe the subtle emotional choreography of approach to and movement away from queer issues.

Significance
While no participant explicitly stated that happiness trumped the inclusion of queers, the affective slides and jumps suggested that LGBTQ students can be an “unhappiness-cause” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 95). If sexual minorities create unhappiness, teachers may turn away.

Authors

• Nancy L. Lesko, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Stephanie McCall, Teachers College, Columbia University