Affective Education Research In, Around, and About the WorldPride Parade

• In Event: Affective Cunning: Curriculum With/in Relational Networks of Gender, Knowledge, and Violence

Abstract

My presentation lays out plans for the beginning of my dissertation research project about queerness and the affective flows in, around and about a major Pride parade in Washington DC, which is the site of WorldPride 2025. WorldPride is an international event that began a quarter century ago, and includes films, music, and other special happenings, one of which is the Parade that celebrates LGBTQ2S+ life and expression. The parade will take place on Constitution Avenue and pass among famous monuments, museums, the Capitol, other iconic institutions, and celebrities.

Queerness is “a way of naming, describing, doing, and being” (McCann & Monaghan, 2019, p. 1); it is a continual process of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), and a way of disrupting what has been normalized. Pride parades not only put queer on display, but also have been a means to remedy and repair what has taken place during the hurtful, oppressive past. In fact, Pride, in its origins, was a collective reaction to violence and oppression carried out against queer peoples (McFarland Bruce, 2016; Peterson, et. al., 2018; Valente & Hornby, 2023), such as the violence that occurred at the Stonewall Inn in the 1980s, as well as more subtle violence acts of cruel legal restrictions performed on all types of bodies.

In any case, like a parade, my research is not about reactivity and oppression. Rather, it is about positive, desiring production (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2000). As well, it involves lessons that might be learned in public pedagogy, which has been studied in a variety of public contexts, including art sites (e.g., Christen, 2010), museums (e.g., Kridel, 2010), and historical places (e.g., Darnell & Murray, 2008) and by way of a queering of more than just gender and sexuality (Kunzel, 2018); my work, in part, is about queering and injecting discontinuity into the education research enterprise.

An aspect of my queer, becoming, research, is autobiographical due to my lived experience as the daughter of lesbian women; to some education researchers this could lead to queering as a means to make the self and so-called “other” unfamiliar (e.g., Miller, 2012). Instead, my approach is to turn to the “outside” in order to examine affective forces—a folding approach of self-subjectification (Deleuze, 1986/2000) that radiates out in streams of street extravaganza. The result is, and will be, affirmative action, positivity rather than reactivity. Following Deleuze, during the symposium, I will present a moving montage aligned with these forces, actions and LGBTQ2S+ parading, the Pride research archive, self-subjectification, and a mapping of the yet-to-come international WorldPride parade and festival, with the intent of producing affect (c.f., Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994).

Author

• Chris Sharp, George Washington University