Abstract
Within this article, I think with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthumanist theories of affect and assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to argue that literacy learning within a first grade classroom (NYC) involved allure (Thrift, 2008), or more-than-human technologies of public intimacy that were affectively contagious and seemed to take on a life of their own. By doing so, I contribute a new dimension to literacy-gender debates by exploring how the im/material practices of allure emerge to produce entanglement, bliss, and even violence. While male students’ entangled reading practices disrupted popular assumptions of “failing boys,” thereby making new gendered and literate subjectivities possible, these practices, at times, further reinforced rigid heteronormativities. Ultimately, attending to literacy learning as alluring invites more ethically response-able (Barad, 2007) considerations that take seriously how the forces of gender, sexuality, and race work to animate/contain bodies, spaces, and things, as well as shape the un/making of students as “successfully literate.”
Highlights
In the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the general trend within literacy and gender debates has been to construct girls as successful literacy learners and boys as “literacy failures” (Skelton & Francis, 2011, p. 459)
Since the late 1990s, discourses of successful girls and failing boys have circulated within media, popular psychology, and educational research to suggest that, largely due to second-wave feminists’ efforts to equalize social, educational, and employment experiences for females, the future has become female (McRobbie, 2009; Ringrose, 2013)
In turn, positioned as the new disadvantaged—i.e., the underachieving “losers” of feminism (Martino, 2008; McRobbie, 2009; Ramazanoglu with Holland, 2002; Ringrose, 2013; Skelton & Francis, 2009, 2011). This “boy problem” (Bissell-Brown, 1990) has become synonymous with a “crisis” in literacy (Weaver-Hightower, 2003). It is steeped in a kind of gender essentialism that homogenously pits boys and girls against one another (Renold, 2004) in order to fuel a media driven panic logic that problematically marks the figure of the underachieving male as both the poster boy for “literacy letdown” (Harris, 2015) and the victim of reverse sexism
Summary
Affect is useful for rethinking and further problematizing the notion of a gender gap in literacy. 263), and markedly uneven textures of social life In this way, affect theories enable a view of bodies as im/materialdiscursive phenomena (Barad, 2007; Blackman, 2012) that can never be wholly captured by static, linguistic codes (see Grosz, 1993; Puar, 2011), such as “good reader” or “underachieving boy.”. Such categories do not determine who a subject is (e.g., the concepts of female and feminine might come to “stick” to a male body as much as a female one), but rather highlight the dynamic processes at work to code or territorialize (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) our desires, relations, and connections to other social bodies within complex affective assemblages that are always “partial, dispersed, fragile, tentative” A “body’s function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies. . . it forms an [affective] assemblage with” (Malins, 2004, p. 85, as cited in Ringrose, 2011, p. 601)
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