Cris Mayo

Testing Resistance: Busno‐cratic power, standardized tests, and care of the self

I will argue in what follows, following the insights of James Marshall on busno‐cratic power, that resistance to this new power is already well underway, and that this resistance is potentially problematic and potentially transgressive (in Marshalls words ‘a reflective reconstitution’) . The self is not only a chooser in busno‐cratic land, it is also re‐commodifying itself and in so doing, beginning to struggle at the limits of its commodified situation. I will argue that commodified selves, as much as they are constrained, are also potent sites for resistance. Part of that resistance is being waged in the terrain of the high stakes test, where the self that could ‘choose’ runs headlong into a product that definitively limits its range of choice. In order to engage critically with this resistance, I examine the cracks in the monolithic power of testing, cracks that point to the uncertainty of numbers and the ambivalent anxieties of test takers.

Philosophy of Education is Bent

Troubled times in education means that philosophers of education, who seem to never stop making defenses of our field, have to do so with more flexibility and a greater understanding of how peripheral we may have become. The only thing worse than a defensive philosopher is a confident and certain philosopher, so it may be that our very marginality will give us renewed energies for problematizing education. Occupying our marginal position carefully and in concert with other marginal inquiries, I think, will do our field good. Because of its attention to what it takes to be willing to learn and to approach theoretical and real world obstacles with open if cautious interest, philosophy of education is about holding concepts and movements in tension, bending the implications of commonplace, commonsensical ideas about education, and carefully examining the all of these maneuvers for the exclusions they wittingly and unwittingly produce. Problematizing the certainties derived from majoritarian positions, be it whiteness, Westernness, or any other dominant perspective, can provide us with a diversity of claims to scrutinize and epistemological positions to be wary of.

Intersectionality and Queer Youth

Pinar, W. F. (2003). Queer theory in education. Journal of Homosexuality, 45, 357–360. Raffo, S. (1997). Introduction. In S. Raffo (Ed.), Queerly classed: Gay men and lesbians write about class (pp. 1-8). Boston: South End Press. Tappan, M. (2000). Autobiography, mediated action, and the development of moral identity. Narrative Inquiry, 10, 81–109. Tappan, M. (2005). Domination, subordination, and the dialogical self: Identity development and the politics of “ideological becoming.” Culture and Psychology, 11, 47–75. Villarejo, A. (2005). Tarrying with the normative: Queer theory and Black history. Social Text, 23(3–4), 69–84. Wexler, P. (1992). Becoming somebody: Toward a social psychology of school. London: Falmer Press. Whitlock, R. U. (2006). Queerly fundamental: Surviving straightness in a rural southern high school. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 3, 165–186. Whitlock, R. U. (2007). This corner of Canaan: Curriculum studies of place and the reconstruction of the South. New York: Peter Lang. Willie, S. (2003). Acting Black: College, identity, and the performance of race. New York: Routledge.

Humorous Relations: Attentiveness, Pleasure and Risk.

Abstract This article focuses on the structures of humor and joke telling that require particular kinds of attentiveness and particular relationships between speaker and audience, or more specifically, between classmates. First, I will analyze the pedagogical and relational preconditions that are necessary for humor to work. If humor is to work well, the person engaging in humor needs to gauge their interlocutors carefully. I discuss, too, the kinds of listening necessary for listening for the joke, including attentiveness to complex possibilities for meaning. This attentiveness to complexity is linked to curiosity and a willingness to be startled, two qualities that are central to the risk and pleasure of learning discussed by Socrates and Maria Lugones. Examining the place of risk in Socrates’ teaching and the place of serious play in Maria Lugones’ discussion of difference, I suggest that humor can help to illuminate complicities and invite more robust interactions with difference, creating pleasurable encounters to work through difficult social divisions.

Tangling with Masculinity: Butchness, Trans, and Feminism

This chapter examines relatively new theoretical work on female masculinity in conversation with ethnographic work on butches and transpeople. I argue here that new queer forms of masculinity need to be seen in closer relation to gender bias and that the project of new masculinity ought to consider its ambivalent relationship to the disparaged feminine. Interviews and observations of the harassment that butch girls and trans young men face in public schools help illuminate the role of anti-female sexism in maintaining a hostile environment for students engaged in practices of queer masculinity. By examining this link between the derogation of femininity and the reconstitution of masculinity, I hope to show that there is more to undoing a binary than displacing it. Rather, the tangle of masculinity and femininity remains in the tension of innovation and response.