Affects of Sensational True Crime Sex and Violence Texts

• In Event: Affect in Education

Abstract

This presentation is about everyday and extraordinary literacies; affective couplings and uncouplings of texts and bodies surrounding a true crime sex and violence drama played out through media and framed with Deleuze (1981/2003) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972/2000) concepts of bodies and desiring-production; how texts triggered people to produce and enact texts, and, how texts inscribed and were taken up and into bodies. A guiding research question was: what can sex and violence texts and bodies do?

The presentation centers on the sensational trial (and associative literacies) of Jodi Arias, who shot, stabbed, and slit the throat of her Mormon ex-lover. Using data walking, tracing, and mapping (Eakle, 2007), data were collected and assembled from digital online sources including social network media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog sites as well as newscasts, true crime broadcast media, and televised court hearings and transcripts. Through my study, I was guided and tossed about by “digital affects…pools of intensity…viral flows of information and feedback loops” (Niccolini, under review) where affects move about, stick, and fly apart in a “complex network of human and nonhuman forces… [pertaining to] cuts and entanglements” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 734); these methodological notions had literal and virtual applications and associations to the Arias true crime data. As will be shown in the proposed presentation, the cuts and entanglements of the data collection and analyses led me to refrain (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) and writing as a means to cope with the retching, sensational affectivities of the digital true crime sex and violence texts that I took up and into my body.

Further, playing off notions of the true crime detective genre and Foucault (as read by Deleuze, 1988/1986), data were written on the inside and outside of the drama using multiple voices to reach toward a “voice without organs” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 733) and to brush back and forth among and outside institutional organ-isms, ranging from those of schooling, scientific writing style, and sexual norms. Through “Inside Editions,” examples are shown of sensational texts generated through the couple’s desiring-productions and spiraling obsessions, driven by taboo, and theatricalized through legal literacies in courtrooms. And, through “Outside Editions,” Sunshine Laws (Faubel, 2013) provided conditions for widespread disseminations and capitalizations of the Arias drama by media organ-izations. Moreover, Internet users transformed these legal texts for dark humor, self-identification, and amateur sleuthing.

Similar sex and violence texts to the Arias drama are readily available through mass media and played out through people’s lives in actual spaces (e.g., Ferguson, Missouri). These texts can be shoved into the unconscious only to resurface in various ways when activated by sensations, words, and other texts. Affective resurfacings can have deleterious effects. The stickiness of difficult texts is challenging for practitioners; yet, perhaps it is just because of such challenges that they should be acknowledged in education settings and on a Body without Organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) where those texts can possibly become vital ones, rather than those that spiral into obsession, objectification, and death.

Author

• A. Jonathan Eakle, George Washington University