"TERFs Are a Thing. And I F*cking Hate Them": Developing Solidarity Through Emotion and Ideology

• In Event: Emotion and Sense-Making in Politicized Contexts: Expanding the Conversation

Abstract

This project investigates how emotions and ideology shape sense-making about gender and sexuality-based marginalization in the context of a virtual reality (VR) interactive narrative that explores queer and trans, non-binary marginalization in STEM learning. I present an illustrative case of one participant's reflection upon the narrator’s story of seeking to belong in a women’s coding group where they share overarching experiences of being gender marginalized but then feeling excluded by the gender assumptions that all members are women. The reflexive moment explores marginalization and desire for belonging from the similar (non-binary) and divergent (misgendered male versus female) standpoints of non-binary people.

Extending Ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenological concept of orientations with complementary learning sciences theories of ideological stance-taking (Philip et al., 2017) and emotional configurations (Vea, 2020), I highlight moments of emotional-ideological sense-making where learners become reoriented by reflexively negotiating between themselves and marginalized objects and people.

The study setting is over Zoom videoconferencing, in which seven participants were interviewed while they played the VR experience and shared their game screen to Zoom. I present the case of Clare, a non-binary person in their early fifties who is misgendered by society as male. The VR narrator is also non-binary but is misgendered by society as female. I transcribed videos and identified emergent themes that were further refined through my theoretical focus on identifying occurrences that involved reasoning about gender and sexuality through ideological stance-taking and emotional configurations.

Clare shares that after hearing the narrator’s story, they felt empathetic but also disconnected from the narrator. Clare explains their desire to be included in women’s groups but being barred due to being misgendered as male. They felt that, in their experience, women-dominated spaces are more supportive and safe, which contradicted the VR narrator’s experience. Clare then draws upon their socio-political knowledge of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and ideological-emotional stance against them as resources to reason through how Clare shares a similar experience with the narrator of exclusion from women’s spaces by TERFs. Clare uses their ideological-emotional stance against TERFs to make sense of shared experiences and to develop solidarity with the narrator, despite their previous emotional disconnect.

A phenomenology of reorientation can support analyzing solidarity as a turning toward the marginalized other that involves negotiating emotional configurations (Vea, 2020) and ideological stance-taking (Philip et al., 2018). Further, identifying how reorienting processes occur between marginalized people with different marginalizing experiences demonstrates how solidarity is an accomplished interaction and not a state of being, even among those with shared marginalized identities. Finally, this analysis highlights how trans people show up for one another in what Malatino (2020) calls preservative love, where the commitment to showing up requires acknowledging how socio-political systems fail us and how “recurrent, habitual, and mundane” trans care work is integral to our survival. An empirical analysis of how solidarity is learned contributes to the learning sciences scholarship on political learning and supports further development of social justice research and practice.

Author

• Dylan Paré, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author