Playfully studious teaching as a reparative affective replacement for microfascism

Abstract

This post-qualitative inquiry investigates the challenge of microfascism for curriculum and pedagogy. Contemporary schooling has been rightly implicated in the expression and production of microfascist desires for control, and the situation seems to demand a robust political response through curriculum and pedagogy. However, as this examination of the literature shows, any antifascist teaching finds itself in a bind: it can neither fully relinquish its designs on students nor directly confront microfascism with an opposing force. By synthesizing disparate lines of theory, I argue for one possibility of escape from this binary trap—not through a dramatic denial or a forceful shock to the system but through a gentle yielding to subversive affects already flowing through contemporary teaching. Building on concepts of studious play, toys, queer use, growing sideways, and drag pedagogy, I propose the concept of playfully studious teaching. I then collect exhibits of its occurrence within an actual educational institutional context—my Japanese university classrooms—for display in a cabinet of curiosities, not as best practices but as citable and free pedagogical toys. I thereby illustrate how playfully studious teaching, as itself a queer use of schooling practices as toys, opens potential spaces for antifascist experimentation and different becoming.