The intra-active production of normativity and difference

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children’s encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an ‘emergent intracorporeal multiplicity’ [Fritsch, K. 2015. “Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations.” Foucault Studies 19: 43–66, 51]. From the feminist new materialist perspective that the authors work with, the child is configured not as an entity prior to, or separate from, encounters with education systems, but emergent with-in them. This paper focuses on difference in human relations, and in particular on the intersections of disability and gender. It does so not in terms of essential characteristics of individuals, but as emergent, in-the-moment, with others. In focussing on the detail of lives-in-their-making, the authors ask, with Barad [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], if we are interested in justice, how we are to ‘understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?’