Backward English: Dangerous Books, Unruly Teens, and Ugly Feelings

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Ink on Paper: Figurations of the Subject English

Abstract

In Feeling Backward, Love (2007) explores a queer temporality asking her readers to “resist the affirmative turn in queer studies” (p.4) and to instead face that “modernity—with its suggestions of progress, rationality, and technological advance—is intimately bound up with backwardness” (p.5). Exploring a host of “ugly feelings” (Ngai, 2005), she mines them not to transform them into sites of political efficacy or untapped agency, but instead to imagine a “backward future” (p.147) where politics as we know it might cohere into hitherto unimaginable and tenuous configurations “where even the most reluctant of among us might want to live” (p.163).

My work on queer youth has led me to see some startling resonances between Love’s (2007) conception of “backwardness” and larger cultural constructions of adolescence (Lesko, 2012) and adolescent readers (Lewis & Petrone; 2011; Sarigianides, 2012). Indeed, Love (2007) catalogues a host of signifiers that affectively “stick” (Ahmed, 2004) to both queer and ‘reluctant’ adolescent bodies: “shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heart-break […] immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame” (p.146). In this paper, I take up Love’s framework of “backwardness” and Berlant’s (2011) notion of “cruel optimism” to disrupt dominant discourses surrounding adolescent readers. Doubly backwards, these discourses (re)produce the subject of the intractable teen while being haunted by a specter of backwardness through a Foucauldian (1980) “incitement to discourse” where adolescents are incited to read the very texts that are forbidden.

Part of a larger study on censorship in US secondary public schools, in this paper I risk a backwards methodology by moving in and out of historical moments to queerly disrupt “the idea of a linear, triumphantlist view of history” (p.3) and offer a “queer histiography” (Love, 2007) of adolescent ‘illicit’ reading. Drawing on empirical and autoethnographic work, in the first I counterpose faculty’s reaction to a female student’s reading of Fifty Shades of Grey (James, 2011) in an urban classroom to century-old pedagogical recommendations in Erasmus Darwin’s (1797) A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education at Boarding School (Flint, p.106). Next, I turn to invocations of ‘backwardness’ in a study on students’ pleasure in African American lesbian erotica in a NYC public school. I follow backwardness as a trope into popular media surrounding the Arizona ban on Mexican American texts, in one case, through an investigation of a cartoon where teens take banned books over a barbed-wire wall ‘back’ to Mexico. These events all open a queer space of liminality where, as the headline for the cartoon reads, books are “Neither banned nor allowed.” Rather than peripheral to ‘official’ (national) curricula, I see controversies surrounding adolescent reading as intimately tied to modernist anxieties surrounding nation-building as well as to contemporary discourses of national security.

I further use these moments to think about how attention to “backwardness” in educational research might stymie the future-oriented “panoptimism” Lesko and Talburt (2012) see suffusing research on youth and to imagine the curricular and pedagogical (im)possibilities to which non-progress oriented narratives might bring us forward or back.

Author

• Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University