Gun Violence, Student Identity, and American Schooling

• In Event: Theorizing Gun Violence: School Shootings, Politics, and Curriculum

Abstract

To begin the panel, this paper asks, What is it about schools that make them seem like appropriate places for a particular genre of theatrical violence, namely, ‘‘targeted school shootings”? Through a critical analysis of portrayals of schools in the popular media, he discusses the meaning of schools in American life, and examines how these meanings may have played a role in prominent school shootings. Schools are portrayed in popular discourse as a place of both "refuge and innocence," on the hand, and of "violence and humiliation" on the other. These images, and the meanings attached to them, contribute to the phenomenon of school shootings: violence seems appropriate in schools because the practices involved with compulsory schooling are themselves understood as acts of violence. The presentation will also touch on the prominence of schools as the pivotal stage that connects the private to the public. Recent critical media scholarship has argued that schools, particularly suburban high schools (the site of many school shootings), are portrayed in the American popular media as places where the drama of “expressive individualism” plays itself out. That is, schools are seen as places where students find out who they “really are,” overcoming authoritarian teachers, stultifying curricula, and confining peer cliques. I will argue that locating this expressive quest within schools, however, also makes schools seem like appropriate places for violence as an act of expressive individualism gone awry. Schools, in other words, can come to be seen as places to make visible and highly charged statements about one's identity - one's disappointment and sadness, one's humiliation and rage, or one's strength and masculinity.

Author

• Bryan R. Warnick, Ohio State University