Inconvenient Pedagogies: Getting in the Way with The Handmaid’s Tale

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

Abstract

At her high school graduation in May 2024, Annabelle Jenkins, a student from Meridian, Idaho, made national news when she used Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to stage a “quiet protest” (Edwards, 2024) against the book’s removal from the school library. After smuggling the book within her graduation robe, Jenkins revealed it to the crowd then attempted to hand it off to her superintendent. He refused the offering and Jenkins placed it at his feet. A 12-second TikTok video of the event garnered 25 million views overnight and Jenkins’ act was quickly heralded in the media as a bold protest to rampant book bannings in the US (see e.g. Author, XXXX; Knox 2015).

From protest cosplaying in red robes at supreme court hearings to Jenkins’ activism, Atwood’s feminist classic has become a symbol of protest. As Atwood (quoted in Beaumont & Holpuch, 2018) herself remarks, “The handmaid’s costume has been adopted by women in many countries as a symbol of protest about various issues having to do with the requisitioning of women’s bodies by the state. […] Because it’s a visual symbol, women can use it without fear of being arrested for causing a disturbance, as they would be for shouting in places like legislatures” (n.p.).

This postqualitative (St. Pierre, 2019) paper is similarly interested in the use of Atwood’s book as a material and affective object of protest that does important pedagogical work—teaching “inconveniently” about curricular injustice and systemic “assemblages of violence” (Wozolek, 2020). Here, we “follow” the affects (Ahmed, 2004) the book produces in various political encounters. We theorize the book’s use as what Ahmed (2023) and Berlant (2022) both term as an “inconvenient” object. According to Berlant (2022), when we feel inconvenienced (or outraged, disgusted, sentimental, or piqued), the body is paying attention. Berlant believes that “at a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world....it might be triggered by anything....it might be spurred by ordinary racism, misogyny, or class disgust, which can blip into consciousness as organic visceral judgements” (p. 2). Ahmed (2024), likewise, urges “getting in the way” and being “inconvenient” as feminist means of disrupting systems of oppression.

Rather than a grand political gesture, then, a book at the superintendent’s feet is a minor “inconvenience” to step aside or over and yet it unavoidably teaches about the injustice. We see such inconvenience as a potent pedagogical and political tool that forces what Berlant calls “readjustment.” As Berlant argues, “heuristics alone don't defeat institutions like, say, racialized capital, patriarchy, or the fantasy of the law as justice. But they do spark blocks that are inconvenient to a thing’s reproduction” (p. 22). We conclude by thinking through the “inconvenient pedagogies” around race, gender and sexuality that banned books bring into schools and why these are considered threatening to many school leaders, parents, and politicians.

Authors

• Alyssa Niccolini, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Bessie P. Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University