‘Dirty clothes’: intra-active entanglements in a curriculum of sexual violence

ABSTRACT

Politically expedient approaches to difficult knowledge about sexual violence have included educational practices that create conditions for ‘safe’ spaces, such as announcing content in advance, trigger warnings and other pedagogical practices that make care allowable and smooth out the sharp edges of violence that can knowingly invoke trauma. This paper is about the power of curricular materials charged with violence in educational practices that cannot guarantee safety. I draw from feminist new materialisms to analyse the thing-ness of clothing in an art installation that was curated as a sexual violence prevention curriculum at my university. I consider the clothing as mattering as the substance of affect and thought. The starting point is that pedagogies of affectively charged encounters in education produce relations of danger and repair with important implications for victims’ and survivors’ knowledge, memory and trauma. The goal is to question the hope for pedagogical guarantees concerning difficult knowledge and understand what more precarity might mean for pedagogical responsibility in sexual assault curricula. The paper concludes by considering the curricular possibilities of difficult affective knowledge for a kind of queer healing and collective attention to sexual violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• difficult knowledge
• sexual assault
• rape myths
• feminist new materialisms
• affect

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Bessie Dernikos and Caitlin Long for their time and thoughtful insights on an early draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I feel I am treading on thin ice here and without the focus and space to go deeper. I direct readers to Bennett’s more elaborate discussions about moral responsibility and willing subjects entangled in intersubjective fields where she draws on Derrida, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno and others for analytic inspiration. Here, I will hold on to the idea of intentionality even if with ‘less definitive outcomes’ (Bennett 2002, 32).