Pedagogy of Anxiety

Abstract

The Pedagogy of Anxiety project has been inspired by my teaching experiences in a graduate film and media seminar, Transnational Feminist Practices, which I have offered in the English Department at Ohio University. The core of the project is an analysis of Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelinčić’s 1996 Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War, and Women, a testimonial documentary that reconstructs war events involving two women who grapple with representing their past in Prijedor after the Serbian takeover in 1992. My analysis asks: if, as these women painfully claim, the terrible “truth” of rape and torture is hidden in the female body, if the violated body carries the truth inside, what does it mean for a filmic medium to engage itself in the process of excavation of such lived trauma? Prompted by Patricia Yaeger’s work, which argues that academics are “busy consuming trauma,” I focus on these issues to start a wider pedagogical discussion about the ethics of teaching trauma texts—what I refer to as a “pedagogy of anxiety.” I propose to explore tactics of disidentification in order to forestall a limited, affective reception of such texts through a process of narcissistic appropriation.