What's love got to do with it? The effect of affect in the academy

Abstract

This article argues that in the dominant discourse of the academy a questionable binary between reason and emotion holds sway. This binary is profoundly gendered with the emotional and bodily situated on the feminine side of the binary while reason and intellect are on the male side. Moreover, the binary is not neutral. The expression of emotion is viewed as undermining the capacity for reason and intellect. The article attempts to disrupt the false logic of this binary, arguing that our passions and emotions are necessarily implicated in processes of learning, knowledge production, pedagogy and truth seeking. If we wish to achieve the goal of engaged, critically thinking students which many of us claim to want to achieve, we need to speak, in Freire's terms, ‘true words’ which involves acknowledging the role of love, anger, fear and all the other aspects of our identity as academics and of the identity of our students which impact on our interaction in the academy.