The Cruelty of Happy Futures and Female Success With/in the Logics of "College" Knowledge

• In Event: Affect in Education

Abstract

Failure is everywhere at the same time that it is an unthinkable project in school. Yet, neoliberal obsessions with knowledge, futurity, and success disallow certain ways of being in relation to knowledge. This forecloses possibilities for animating and inhabiting failure and for questioning the objects, material, and projects that mark success. Halberstam (2011) describes failure as a way of being and unbeing in the world, and “these modes of unbeing and unbecoming propose a different relation to knowledge” (p.23). Inspired by Halberstam’s queering the logics of failure, the purpose of this paper is to explore curricular knowledge and chase some of the affects and effects of success in two all-girls schools. To do so, I theorize college as an object of desire that produces a cruel relation (Berlant, 2011) to success and overly rationalizes logics of curricular knowledge.

Theoretical sources for this paper are feminist poststructuralist theory (Butler, 1990), affect theory (Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011; Halberstam, 2011) and girlhood studies (Ringrose, 2013; Harris, 2004) towards critical analyses of curriculum. Brought together, these investments support analyses of the production of “successful” female success through curricular knowledge in highly gendered contexts of all-girls schools.

In a postfeminist scene of unambiguous female success, the stage for this study was in schools that uncritically pushed girls towards a singular version of female success – going to college. This paper reports analyses and interpretation of data collected in a 2-year qualitative multi-case study (Stake, 2006). Poststructuralist critical discourse analysis (Luke, 1995-1996) was used to understand storylines about success that circulated through curricular knowledge. I began with the assumption that affective intensities of college-going flow through the pedagogic discourse of academic knowledge and social relations (Bernstein, 1990).

Data were collected from seven focus group interviews with 11th and 12th grade girls. Analyses and interpretation of interview data is contextualized by classroom observation data collected during an academic year at each school. Classroom observations allowed me to trace logics of success and how college functioned as an object that animated rationalities of curricular knowledge and female futures.

Discourses of female success in these schools flattened out important textures of academic success, failure, and failed feminism. Women across both schools were expected to desire and attend the nation’s most elite colleges and universities. Failure to “choose” particular objects of future success was thought in both schools to be failed projects of self-invention. Cruelty is exposed in the intense ways that girls attach to the “cluster of promises” (Berlant, 2011) and guarantees associated with attending elite colleges.

The significance of this paper is to explore what could happen when curriculum scholars go beyond theorizing rationality and fantasies of curricular knowledge as solely for-profit and “educational uplift” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 13). There is merit in seeing what happens when we live irrationalities and ignorance “as a potent and multiple a thing as knowledge” (Sedgwick, 2003, p.4) to provoke failure and insist on alternatives to suppressed discourses and fears of failure in relation to the mastery, monitors, and monikers of normative success.

Author

• Stephanie McCall, Teachers College, Columbia University