Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl

A New Materialist Perspective on Gender Inequity in Schools

Melissa Wolfe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, this book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. The text ultimately illustrates how gender and race inequity is reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential.

Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl maps affective accounts of students' everyday experiences in school spaces. Student negotiations with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection are explored to illustrate how inequities are systematically reproduced. Chapters also offer an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male space. Engaging theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, the text highlights filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project, and calls for alternative educational encounters which affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking.

This text will benefit postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory and feminist theory, as well as educational policy and politics more broadly will also benefit from this book.

1Feeling-Thinking-Making More Equitable Lives through Education

Prelude

Troubling times. The world continues to become differentially. Inequity is rampant not just in our schools but in our societal assemblages which are amplified in a making-of-time of multiple entangled crises points that has passed as 2020. It is a time of reckoning, and we¹ notice that we are not so egalitarian and not so free as popularly reported and assumed, even in left wing and feminist circles. Inequities prevail and are intensified in difficult times and when resources dwindle—it becomes blatantly obvious in the times of COVID-19 (a novel coronavirus), and climate crises, that some bodies are more valued than other bodies—differentiated bodies are assessed as lesser and not mattering as much or at all and even blamed for the crises they are enduring. The assumed freedoms in everyday events differentiate as ‘not only gendered, they are also shaped by intersectional forces—entanglements of class, race, sexuality, age, illness/disability’ (Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2020, p. 3) as a public debate erupts justifying why some ‘lesser’ populations are in fact expendable. As Lupton (2021, p. 18) states, ‘risk has been associated with the othering of marginalised social groups: often involving moral judgements about lack of personal responsibility’, and these blamings make us feel safer—through the social construction of bounded differentiating risk. Or in the case of the aged, they are expendable just simply because they are old, and not seen as contributing—they have had their life. Humans must take response-ability for interfering ‘in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species’ (Braidotti, 2020, p. 1) including the consequence resulting in the emergence of COVID-19.

Lupton (2020, p. 1) further notes ‘contagion is always a social phenomenon, infused with and understood through situated and shifting meanings and practices’ emerging within a society. Thus ethically, race as a construct of colonial domination cannot be ignored in a book written by a white (settler descendent) woman (born on Gunakurnai land). This book was written in a colonized country that was never ceded by its Indigenous peoples; Australia is a nation which continues to deny Indigenous sovereignty and inhibits Indigenous self-governance and sovereignty and where the

theft of Indigenous people's land and subsequent dispossession, rape, massacres, forced incarceration on reserves and forced use of our labour provided the basis for white race privilege in this country.

(Moreton-Robinson, 2000, p. 69)

This is the contextual basis from whence I, my writings and my films emerge.

Global tensions mount in 2020, and into 2021, as white privilege continues as ‘the invisible omnipresent norm’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2000, p. xix). White privilege is violently made visible in the horrific televised death of American George Floyd on social media. An act that reignited and solidified momentum for the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe. A black man who cannot breathe, a basic human right. Here in Australia, in 2020 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners made up 29% of all prisoners whilst comprising only 3% of the population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020). The continuing high level of black deaths in custody (431 since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody) (Allam, Wahlqist, Banister, & Herbert, 2020) should be a national disgrace, rather than a debatable phenomenon. Racism is alive and well. The virus of racism is amplified by the virus COVID-19.

The alarming statistics of the sick and dead across the world have appeared nightly on our TV screens, desensitizing us to the dying and impaired other. But these electric nightmares do materialize across global shores and do touch us. Initially, the virus spread with the globe-trotting masters-of-the-universe, the untouchable elites, the entrepreneurs, businesspeople who rule the world, jet-setting families holidaying in Spain and skiing in Aston, spreading a virus that will eventually kill mainly the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in society. After some denial and inexcusable inaction, governments across the globe eased contact restrictions in order to prioritize failing (growth) economies over their own citizens’ health and well-being. The health and economic costs continue to be borne more heavily by those deemed lesser—the displaced, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), the aged, the disabled, the poor and women. Our free Western society materializes as not so free as whole communities are risked whilst deemed responsible for their own fates. The economy is assessed as more important than the health of ‘lesser than’ the entitled cisgender, heterosexual white men, epitomized by the American President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. They make decisions whilst refusing to publicly wear a mask, as they have in the past refused to wear condoms, a performance they interpret as a sign of weakness to their masculinity. The lost people (Braidotti, 2019) are the old, the sick, Indigenous, the homeless, the poor, Black and people of color, differently abled and women, not to mention the other than human, the ecology—as climate change continues to devastate the planet.

Materiality bites, the world and its things are both tactile and kinesthetic where experiences are synthesized in ways beyond words—a more than analytics (Garber, 2019): I feel the lockdown acutely as I am in transit whilst writing this book, returning from my self indulgent fossil fueled international sabbatical I am caught out. I am not in my comfortable secure home situated on the land of the Boonwurrung. I too now feel precarious. As I write I am in lockdown in a tiny flat with no outside—my body restricted from moving. I feel intensely. I am suffocating. I can’t breathe. My body constrained, my relations constrained, my will constrained. My white privileged life is turned upside down. The flats where I am staying in emergency accommodation empty out overnight vacated by the migrant gig economy workers who live there. They just disappear—with their jobs—I wonder where they have gone. I am the only resident left on my floor. ‘To let’ signs pop up like mushrooms overnight, all around the neighborhood. My bodymind aches tortured by a makeshift desk, chair and screen. I force myself on daily walks attempting to keep my anxiety at bay. I wipe all the shared doors down with disinfectant. I have developed dermatitis from washing my hands too much. I watch the movement of people in their apartments in the opposite building from my kitchen window—like James Stewart in Rear Window, making up fictional stories to keep my mind busy and help disconnect from my senses and rising panic.

Once teaching finishes, I escape to our family cabin—built by my late father, recently burnt out in the catastrophic 2019/20 bushfires. A refuge spared the surrounding forest devastation on the land of the Bidwell people. Escaping the city, the ‘virus’ and lockdown and the painful inflictions of the tiny flat on my body-mind, I am confronted by the climate crises from whence there is no escape. The entanglements of world, climate and virus emerging with the devastating white European huMan are devastatingly apparent. It is June in the southern hemisphere and the winter descends. I chop firewood. I dig a toilet. I install a solar panel to enable ‘work’ from home. I attempt to make a makeshift water collector (the sheds have all burnt down) to ensure a water supply into the surviving concrete tank. The forest is burnt, charred beyond recognition. The towering trees burnt through and precariously awaiting the winds that will eventually come and topple them to the ground. The once lively forest I have visited for half of my childhood and all of my adult life is still; deathly quiet. The little wrens, yellow, red and blue, have returned—hopping and chasing each other through the dead blackened bush and the wombat hollows are active. But what of the koalas, wallabies, king parrots, goannas and snakes that called this forest their home. I await the bulldozers to clear away the outhouse debris, including the burnt verandah. I remain thankful as I stroke the burnt-out trees that blacken my soft white peeling hands, wondering when these giants will also fall. Fungi sprout. Bright green embryonic ferns furl forth. The world is shaking, I am shaken, but Gaia persists.

Introduction

The question this book evokes is, can we re-imagine an education through a shift from the dominant white Eurocentric masculinist ‘logic’ focus of ‘the brain’ and all things cognitive that is our current education system? As Haraway (2016) quoted below states, ‘it matters what thoughts think thoughts’. And what might the consequence of such a shift toward the affective in education be, when we attend to ‘what relations relate relations’ (ibid.)? And what might be the consequence of such a shift towards the affective in education? In Western teaching and learning settings of all categories, emerging from the Enlightenment, there has been a historic and excessive privileging of reason over affect, an oversight ignoring the fact that the brain is the body and the body is the brain; they are not separate but one and the same matter. To reference the body-brain (cf. Pitts-Taylor, 2016) in education is to be confronted with hierarchies of knowledge that diminish the importance, and even deny the power, of the affective that is the sensuous, that is in touch with the world. In this book, I consider repatterning the research event by utilizing Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action² (further discussed in Chapter 2) that allows an understanding of the educational assemblage not as a reasoned ‘thing’ but as a multiplicity of affective events.

Research and pedagogical events in this account collide as perpetual becoming, a repatterning, a fluctuating pulsating enfolding of mattering that can enrich or diminish with its flows of intensities. The ‘event assemblage’ (see Figure 2.1) of schooling is the ongoing circuits, a patterning, which incorporate intensities of relations such as affective affiliations and affective consequence. The event assemblage illustrates the perpetual notion of becoming determinate, where phenomena overlap each other, not as an isolated occurrence but as a continuing interference where the patterns are what matter. Patterns repeat until there is interference, a touching, thought of here as ‘literally being in touch with the other, of feeling the exchange of e-motion in the binding obligations of entanglements’ (Barad, 2012, p. 219). The unique filmic method (Wolfe, 2017, 2018) that I use in my research does not just draw attention to where detrimental effects of affective assemblages appear but shifts, through affective transmission, material-discursive practices in operation that re/cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 Feeling-Thinking-Making More Equitable Lives through Education
• 2 Affective Pedagogical Intra-Action Making Inequity: An Apparatus
• 3 Affect: Feeling-Thinking-Making Belonging at School through Joy and Shame
• 4 Dis/comforting Schoolgirl Figurations of Belonging
• 5 Dis/comforting Subject-Choice: Agency, Anxiety, Affordance
• 6 Enabling Constraints for Angel-in-the-Making
• 7 Feeling-Thinking-Making Gendered and Racialized School Spaces: The Materials Engineering Classroom and Basketball Court
• 8 Feeling-Thinking-Making Joy
• Index