Alyssa D Niccolini. Journal of Gender Studies. Volume 27, Issue 1, 2018.
‘The Rape Joke’
In February 2014, Tanvi Kumar, a US student at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin, published an article called ‘The Rape Joke: Surviving Rape in a Culture that Won’t Let you’ (Kumar, 2014a) in a school-run student magazine. The piece recounted in detail the sexual assaults of three female Fond du Lac students, assembled survey data from the student body, and decried an escalating rape culture at the school. Immediately after its publication, the administration reinstated an out-of-use policy of prior review for all future articles. Among other complaints, the administration argued that the article did not represent the school in a ‘positive’ light (Barrett, 2015). In response, the school’s English department published a 22-page open letter condemning the prior review policy and 60 students conducted a sit-in at the school’s main office wearing ‘FREE OUR VOICE’ shirts and bracelets. Two days later, the principal of the school resigned (Barrett, 2015).
The event gained national attention in major US media outlets such as The Huffington Post, National Public Radio, and Jezebel and was denounced as an infringement on student freedom of speech as well as an act of censorship. In protest to the prior review policy, Kumar published an open letter on Twitter addressed to the school superintendent (Roznik, 2014a). A student-initiated online petition also addressed to the superintendent garnered over 5000 signatures (Pandovano, 2014). Links to the article, open letters, and petition were made public on various online news sources, blogs, and social networking sites, reaching an extensive audience and gaining Kumar interviews with local media and National Public Radio, among others. Kumar was awarded the 2014 Voices of Courage Award from the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault as well as the Kettle Moraine Press Association Tom Gebhardt Journalism Award.
Kumar described the scale of the event, telling The Green Bay Press Gazette, ‘The school board has to realize how many people care about this issue [….] The whole school has been truly brought together behind this cause. They just can’t ignore it’ (quoted in Chitnis, 2014; n.p.). Student Press Law Center Executive Director Frank Lomonte argues there is a gendering of censorship in school journalism, declaring ‘I think there’s no doubt that young women are bearing the disproportionate brunt of censorship because they are the ones that want to write about sensitive social issues’ (quoted in Schiffbauer, 2015, n.p.). This piece explores the ways Kumar’s article politically activated bodies around rape culture both within and outside of the school. In particular, her piece set off varying intensities and conflicted feelings over the regulation of the body, freedom of speech, and gender politics in addition to rape culture. I argue that these intensities were a form of activism, what I call affectivisms, that worked against the attempts at containment and management of feeling attempted by the school.
Affective activisms
‘I was never prepared for something like that as a student […] I think that just goes to show how powerful these topics can be,’ Kumar stated in an interview with the Journal Sentinel (quoted in Phillips, 2014, n.p.). The ‘power’ Kumar cites above was largely an affective political force or affectivisms. I intentionally pluralise affectivisms to signal the multiple affects, political sentiments, and spaces the event activated and traversed. These activisms exceeded the rational intentions of a single political actor and offered feeling in excess of, or in addition to, speech as a political tool. Here collective feeling spurred more traditional forms of political activity, for example, inspiring student bodies to come together to protest outside the school office (Barrett, 2015) and fill an assembly hall for a school board meeting (Chitnis, 2014). They also set off perhaps less discernable acts within traditional schemas of politics. ‘Disturbing’ affects such as outrage, indignation, and disgust interrupted the normative framings that direct and manage bodies in school. In addition, these ‘disturbing’ affects became affective ripostes to the ‘positive’ climate the administration proclaimed the school to have. Here affect itself around the perceived rape culture of the school was an affective ‘weapon’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 356) against the containment, management, diminishment, and co-option of affect into a feel-good politics.
Affect in this piece signals embodied intersections of feeling, emotion, and sensation that resist containment in a single body. In Lisa Blackman’s (2012) words, affect ‘relates to all those processes that are separate from meaning, belief or cognition and that occur at the level of autonomic, preconscious bodily reactions, responses, and resonances’ (p. xi). Like affect itself, which Teresa Brennan (2004) describes as moving ‘beyond the boundary of the skin,’ the affective intensities of the article travelled outside of the bounds of the school space. A large portion of the activisms around the article happened outside of the school space bearing affect’s capacity to travel (Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012). Thrift (2007) offers a helpful elaboration of how affect moves:
affect is understood as a set of flows moving through the bodies of human and other beings, not last because bodies are not primarily centered repositories of knowledge – originators – but rather receivers and transmitters, ceaselessly moving messages of various kinds [.] (p. 236)
Affect has taken an increasingly central role in theorizations of politics (Ahmed, 2004, 2010; Berlant, 2011; Cvetkovich, 2007, 2012; Cvetkovich & Pelligrini, 2003; Holmes, 2008; Massumi, 2002, 2015a, 2015b; Protevi, 2009; among others). Such interests have stoked work on the felt-effects and collective experiences of larger social processes such as late capitalism (Berlant, 2011), biopower (Massumi, 2015a, 2015b; Povinelli, 2011; Weheliye, 2014), geopolitics (Massumi, 2015b; Protevi, 2009; Puar, 2007), and the political implications of our increasingly technologically mediated lives (Clough, 2008; Hillis, Paasonen, & Petit, 2015; Papacharissi, 2015; Terranova, 2004). Cvetkovich and Pelligrini (2003), for example, contest models of emotion and affect as private and disconnected from public and political life. Similarly, the Chicago-based ‘Feel Tank’ operates as a political alternative to the dispassionate rationality implicit in notions of ‘think tanks.’ Here collective feeling, even those considered politically ineffective such as depletion, indecisiveness, indifference, and depression, are mobilized as viable political rejoinders to neoliberal stakes in resilience, choice, rationalization, and productivity (Berlant, 2011; Cvetkovich, 2012).
The ‘hyperempirical’
All data for this piece are culled from online sources. By relying only on online forms of data, the project has forced me out of familiar ethnographic habits of interviewing and a concomitant reliance on the speaking subject. Ringrose and Renold (2014) explore an affective fervor in a focus group during a discussion of an activist’s sign at a SlutWalk that read simply, ‘Fuck Rape!’ They describe how excitement over the recollection of the sign spread through the participants’ and researchers’ bodies and a temporal skip to their later embodied dwellings in ‘the wonder of data’ (MacLure, 2013a, 2013b). They theorize:
‘Fuck rape’ was a palpable ‘hot spot’ in this research encounter, as the girls released these words, shouting them out loud into the classroom air, into the very same sonic space where they had been warned that they could not use the term ‘rape’ or ‘slut’ in their peer lessons on ‘domestic violence.’ There was a tangible sensation of pleasure and rupture in this doing. It was a moment that glowed in a particular joyous way, as the force of their articulation ruptured the boundaries of sexual regulation and school-based censorship. (p. 776)
This piece has also urged me into the affective pulses of data (MacLure, 2013a, 2013b), especially the digital affects the article produced. These non- or more-than-human forces moved between and connected various social fields (Sampson, 2012) both within and outside the school space. Kumar’s piece and the activisms it produced were taken up within the felted textures (Niccolini & Pindyck, 2015; Springgay, 2004) of virtual and actual, online and offline spaces. Papacharissi (2015) argues that the ‘connection between online and offline events is better understood as hyper–empirical rather than casual. Events occur and evolve on paths that are parallel and interconnected’ (p. 62, emphasis added). There is similarly a hyper-empiricism at work in this event as the intensities the article sparked worked both on and in the localized school space as well as moved online outside of its physical parameters.
Though a magazine article is a highly textual social artefact, Kumar’s recountings of histories of sexual violence elicited an affective event beyond the textual. Papacharissi (2015) submits: ‘consider how affective infrastructures of storytelling turn an event into a story and how these stories may sustain a variety of distinct, yet imbricated, events’ (p. 56). The article’s circulation within online space moved it beyond the striation of the school geography and the administrative regulations that sought to contain, organise, and direct bodies, particularly young female bodies, within it. The event also tapped into accelerated flows of larger blocs of affect (Shaviro, 2010) circulating globally around rape culture.
One way to visualize how Kumar’s piece moved within larger global circulations is through Google Trends. Google Trends maps search term frequency over time essentially providing a mapping of attunement and interest. These trends signal pulses of intensities, nodes of curiosity and attention, and informational pooling around events through a concentration of online searches. Affect is an intensity coupled with movement.
For example, a Google Trends search reveals a jump in the frequency of searches for ‘rape’ in December 2012 when international outrage at the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey reached a peak. Likewise, there is a spike in searches for ‘rape culture’ from February to March 2014, directly following when Kumar’s article was published. Whether this spike was caused by Kumar’s article or not, her piece moves within a rising upsurge of ‘rape culture’ searches between 2013 and 2015. Google Trends shows a progression of interest over time, but it has no way of distinguishing whether the searcher was searching the term to engage in activism, support, voyeurism, curiosity, or disdain. The trending map merely reveals undifferentiated waves of interest around a term or terms.
Soft and hard impact
In Kumar’s case, it seemed to be precisely the article’s capacity to travel outside the containment of the school and tap into these global flows of intensity that worried the school administration. The principal was quoted by local media as saying, ‘We want a process in place so the building principal has oversight and guidance about the messages we are sending out into the community’ (quoted in Roznik, 2014a; n.p.). In a similar vein, the superintendent declared, ‘My job is to oversee the global impact of everything that occurs within our school and I have to ensure I am representing everyone and there was some questionable content’ (quoted in Roznik, 2014a; n.p.). Both statements reveal a desire to contain and control the messages being transmitted by and through the school. Kumar’s article extended outside the school touching and moving bodies in the community. Chitnis (2014) reports:
Monday, March 21, [2014] the school’s auditorium was inundated by faculty (particularly English teachers), parents, students, free speech advocates, and even several survivors of rape and sexual assault, as the congregation made a concerted effort to block the new school rule. (n.p.)
In addition to local communities, the article’s online uptake circulated it within ‘global’ networks outside of the containment of the school. These swift movements provided an online extension of the article’s discussions of gender and rape culture as well as got outside of the regulatory and repressive ‘hard’ structures of the school. These online repositories offered sites of soft impact, welcoming digital spaces where moderated commentators supported Kumar over the school administration and that opened a space to proliferate, rather than foreclose, discussions of sexual violence. Papacharissi (2015) terms these ‘homophilious spheres’ where ‘the intensity behind the act of connection or expression, sustained by the mediality of the technology, has already urged a public into being’ (p. 24). These sites of soft impact became pools of affective resonance or ‘affect mini-worlds’ (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 117). The comments below illustrate some of this soft reception:
March 19, 2014 at 12:42 pm
Congrats on a great story on a very disturbing issue. Almost as disturbing as the school administration’s censorship.
1, March 19, 2014 at 4:56 pm
Don’t forget the rape indistry in the military doods and doodettes.
March 19, 2014 at 5:04 pm
Thank you for printing this. I’ve been following this story because this is my high school (Fond du Lac High School is the successor to Goodrich High). In 1977, when I was in college in Madison, we worked to have Judge Archie Simonson recalled (the first recall of an elected official in WI history) because he referred to the way in which a rape student was dressed in leniently sentencing her rapist.
Commentators on Jezebel, a generally ‘homophillious public sphere’ (Papacharissi, 2015) of feminist sentiment, pointed out the irony of the ban:
3/13/14 9:57 pm
These people do realize that teenagers are more likely to read things you ban, right?
3/13/14 9:37 pm
Brush away the smoke and let the fire burn, district officials. This article is about crimes committed by your students and against your students. Shutting down the paper won’t make these crimes go away, but it will make your cowardly inaction and explicit disregard for the bodily autonomy of your female students easier for you to forget. Stories like this make me grateful for the Internet: hopefully these student activists get take their writing to the web and get an even bigger audience.
Yet this swift circulation of political alignment was also interrupted by attacks on notions of rape culture. For example below a commenter dismisses rape culture entirely:
March 22, 2014 at 1:41 am
There is no rape culture in the US or anywhere really and it is really frightening to hear people say essentially ‘Why cant we imprison someone for twenty years based solely on one person’s testimony’ ummm because that’s orwhellian dangerous crazy person! (Turley, 2014)
While soft sites were supportive of Kumar and critical of the school, these spaces were not governed by a feel-good logic. Many commenters shared their own, at times horrific, experiences of sexual violence. In direct opposition to the school’s attempts to control the circulation of the piece and its a/effects, these sites of soft impact encouraged an energetic exchange of affect, a space where intense feeling (both good and bad) and possibilities for ‘connective action’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) were amplified. The article quickly generated impassioned webs of feeling as major media outlets, informal bloggers, and sympathetic commentators shared and emoted around it. These soft sites sped up the liquidity of the piece as well as the liquidity of affect, offering spaces for exchanges of feeling and political sentiment. These soft sites worked alongside sites of hard impact where Kumar butted up against repressive power structures where school regulations, power hierarchies, and legal precedent worked to diminish both the intensity and movement of affect.
Histories of disruption
The hard impact Kumar met was not only regulated by localized school policy, but also bolstered by legal history in the US. Student freedom of speech in schools has borne a contested space in US legal history. In what follows, I briefly outline three legal precedents in the US where student activism and freedom of speech went to the higher courts. Each of these cases bears resonances to the event under discussion here. For example, supporting a view of the danger of ‘politicized’ students during the Civil Rights Movement, three hundred African American students were suspended in Issaquena County in Mississippi for wearing ‘freedom buttons’ to school. The pins were provided by the youth civil rights organization Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; Keene, 2016) and symbolized a call for equal voting rights and the end of racial segregation in the school (Mollen, 2008, p. 1520).
In Blackwell v. Issaquena County, the court sided with the school’s suspensions arguing that the buttons elicited ‘commotion, boisterous conduct, a collision with the rights of others, an undermining of authority, and a lack of order, discipline, and decorum’ (quoted in Mollen, 2008, pp. 1519, 1520). It was determined that when student speech engendered a ‘disruption’ to official school activities, students’ first amendment rights were invalidated. This notion of ‘disruption’ was significant to subsequent rulings and I see it indicative of how affective intensities are often deemed disruptive to school climates and ‘rational’ conceptions of learning.
A second landmark case involving student activism was 1969’s Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District where four students wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War were suspended. Though the students won a suit declaring that their first amendment rights had been restricted, the ruling spelled out what was later widely invoked as ‘the disruption standard.’ A remnant of the Blackwell ruling, the ‘disruption standard’ states that states that ‘school officials may censor student speech only when they may reasonably forecast that the speech will cause ‘substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities’ (quoted in Mollen, 2008, p. 1519). In carefully curated language echoing this decision, the Fond du Lac superintendent stated ‘The most recent edition raised some questions in my mind after reading it as to interference with the educational process, educational environment, and the rights of other student’ (quoted in Roznik, 2014a, n.p.). Here he alludes to Kumar’s (and others’) article(s) as ‘interfering’ with or disrupting the educational process.
In terms of student journalism, in 1983 students at Missouri’s Hazelwood East High School were barred from printing two articles in their school newspaper The Spectrum, one focusing on the effects of divorce and another how teenage pregnancy affected the school. The students took the incident to court and lost when it was tried in the US Supreme Court in 1988 as Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. The Fond du Lac’s school board’s policy on prior review, though years out of use, was tellingly officially enacted in 1988 the year of the Hazelwood decision (Roznik, 2014a). The ruling of Hazelwood is important to Fond du Lac’s case in that the courts decreed that when articles are completed within a for-credit journalism course, the journalism was not a ‘forum for public expression’ but rather a ‘regular classroom activity.’ J. Marc Abrams and S. Mark Goodman (1988) argue that the Hazelwood decision ‘eviscerate[d] the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker’ (quoted in Mollen, 2008, p. 1514) and greatly dampened student freedom of speech rights. This tenuous division put between ‘regular’ classroom activity and an official ‘forum’ for public expression set forth considerable confusion in later cases, including the event with Kumar’s article. For example, official ‘school-sponsored speech’ can be barred if deemed ‘ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences’ (quoted in Imber & van Geel, 2010, p. 135). This is almost verbatim the terms Kumar’s school used in the prior review policy. It states:
All school-sponsored publications shall be subject to review by the principal prior to print and publication. The principal may refuse to publish any materials that substantially interfere with the educational process, educational environment, or rights of other students, or materials that may be reasonably perceived to associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy. In addition, the principal may refuse to publish any materials that are poorly written, inadequately researched, false, defamatory or libelous, vulgar or profane, unsuitable for immature audiences, or biased or prejudiced. The principal’s decision is subject to final review by the Superintendent. (quoted in Roznik, 2014b, n.p., italics added)
And yet Kumar makes a case that although the Cardinal Columns is ‘school-sponsored’ (citing Hazelwood’s language), it is an open forum intended for audiences beyond the school. Kumar underscored the intended publicness of the newspaper to media: ‘I know we are sponsored by the school, but we identify ourselves as a public forum which means we are open to the general use and to the public’ (Kumar quoted in Klein, 2014, n.p.).In addition to arguing for the openness of the piece to the public, Kumar could be seen as cultivating an affective activism or affectivism that circulates precisely the affects the administration sought to bar. Kumar takes the affective disdain undergirding an administrative statement and redirects the repulsion at the school culture:
While I do not classify my article ‘vulgar’ or ‘profane,’ it is biased. It is prejudiced. I wrote this article because I was repulsed by the behavior exhibited by people in this building. I continue to be repulsed by the culture exhibited by my peers and administration. I am prejudiced against an administration that wishes to silence me for speaking out about an issue that touches the lives of people in our schools and our society. (Kumar, 2014b)
Kumar, in her own words, is ‘repulsed’ by the very charges of her piece’s vulgarity:
This story is not false, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, or profane. Unless you view survivors of horrendous atrocities speaking out against a culture that oppresses them as ‘profane,’ or ‘vulgar’ rather than revolutionary or novel. (quoted in Roznik, 2014a, n.p.)
In her study of how digital activism worked with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, Papacharissi (2015) finds that negative affect often galvanises ‘affective publics.’ Each movement she studied was characterized by ‘[a] generali[s]ed expression of indignation, discontent, or disagreement with ongoing, reinforced, and reproduced regimes. These expressions are typically affectively rendered and can be interpreted as affective claims to agency’ (p. 119). Kumar similarly was motivated by ‘indignation, discontent, [and] disagreement with ongoing, reinforced, and reproduced regimes.’ In particular, she disagreed with the school’s claims of a ‘positive’ school climate when she and other students perceived a blatant rape culture.
Positive school climate?
While Kumar provides a nuanced portrait of the women in her article, she avoids a familiar progress-narrative or move towards good feeling and resolution for her interviewees. In her work on Holocaust survivor narratives, Sarah Carney (2004) has theorized how narratives of heroic overcomings of traumatic events work to privilege stories of personal autonomy and healing while concomitantly pathologising non-linear narratives that are not ‘transcendent’ in feel-good ways. In like fashion, one interviewee in Kumar’s piece reveals an ambivalence about support organizations such as one offered at school:
For a long time, I’ve felt organizations [such] as ASTOP [Assist Survivors-Treatment-Outreach-Prevention] focus too much on ‘healing’ and other mushy sounding things instead of facing the cold, often cruel facts […] I see organizations such as that as more of a glorification of self-pity; I do not enjoy the idea of it. (Kumar, 2014a, p. 14).
Rather than ending her article with an optimistic celebration of her interviewees’ endurance and resilience, Kumar uses these case studies as a springboard to question the school’s culture around rape and slut-shaming. The article is also punctuated with sobering statistics and survey results that reveal an overwhelmingly hostile school climate at Fond du Lac. For example, Kumar’s survey data report that more than three-fourths of students polled had heard a rape joke in the past month. An equal number had heard ‘rape’ being used to describe ‘the effects of a difficult test’ (Kumar, 2014a, p. 16), hence the title of the article ‘The Rape Joke.’ Eighty percent reported that slut-shaming and victim-blaming were part of the culture of the high school. Kumar (2014a) uses these data to support her feeling that the school promotes rape culture:
In a survey conducted on randomly selected Fond du Lac High School students, 80.3% believe that every individual has the responsibility to protect themselves from being raped by not wearing revealing clothing or drinking an excessive amount of alcohol. By that definition there is largely a rape culture here at Fond du Lac High School. And Fond du Lac is not alone. High school and colleges nationwide have taken action to address issues of the perception of sexual assault. (p. 13)
Kumar points out the school’s climate might not be positive, at least for all. A blogger chides the administration for their objection to the ‘negativity’ of the piece:
Seriously, hold a pep-rally if what you want to make people feel all good about themselves. Newspapers, and classes designed to inspire the next generation of journalists, should not simply exist to pump up the football team, showcase the robotics team, and profile a teacher every month. They should be outlets for issues that face students at the school they attend and a public forum for enacting change. (How far is too far?, 2014, n.p.)
Elizabeth Stephens (2015) has outlined the importance of bad feeling within feminist genealogies of thought and politics. Sara Ahmed (2010), for example, describes how feminists ‘killjoys’ are often charged with ‘“spoil[ing]” the happiness of others’ (p. 65) by pointing out gender inequities or refusing to find joy in normative structures (see also Ringrose & Renold, 2016). The feminist killjoy is, thus, an ‘affect alien’ who ‘ruin[s] the atmosphere’ and ‘expose[s] the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy’ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 65). Kumar certainly fulfills such an affective role in the school. The administration desires to maintain a happy space free from negative attention. The superintendent fears that Kumar’s article might be harmful to particular student bodies (such as an ‘immature audience’), bodies Ahmed (2010) would argue, that are oriented to particular horizons of happiness. In her open letter to the school superintendent, Kumar (2014b) satirises the decreed negativity of her piece:
As far as our paper needing to be more positive and bring people together, I wholeheartedly agree. The negative reaction to this issue was unprecedented. After we went to print, I was inundated with emails from staff and students thanking me for writing such an article. How dare they? How dare they applaud me for using something so trivial as the press to start conversation about important issues? Some teachers even read the article to their classes to facilitate discussion and debate on the subject. Don’t they know the purpose of education is limited to the memorization of text books? One teacher was even stupid enough to share her story of surviving sexual assault with me. How can we sleep at night knowing people are openly discussing things that should clearly be taboo? I am still puzzled as in to how this issue managed to be our best sold issue yet. It couldn’t possibly have had any material people related to or empathized with. (Kumar, 2014b)
Lesko and Talburt (2012) argue that adults are often directed by a feel-good ‘pan-optimism’ in their interactions with youth and that such ‘impossible fictions are also maintained by nostalgic ideas of classrooms, reading and books’ (p. 282). One online commentator, a Fond du Lac alumna, points how these fantasies inform the administration’s offence to Kumar’s (2014a) piece:
Yet in such an appeal for ‘positive’ stories, FHS administrators seem committed to the sentimental fantasy that high school is a rosy time for varsity games, school pride, and the genial romances of our innocent youth. We know better than this. And we have people like the commendable Ms. Kumar to thank for it. (Berka, 2014, n.p.)
Pandovano (2014), the student who authored the change.org petition, points out that rather than being received negatively, the piece was positively engaged by the school community:
The article, a relevant, compelling and exceptionally well-written piece, became a topic of conversation among students, teachers, and classes. So much so, that the only feedback received by the Cardinal Columns staff was purely positive. In reality, ‘The Rape Joke’ had an incredibly positive effect, allowing an open forum for discussion about sexual abuse, a subject found to be especially taboo in an educational setting such as high school. (n.p.)
The removal or barring of what is deemed disturbing content or materials by school administration are often proclaimed to be in service of creating ‘warm’ and ‘welcoming’ classroom atmospheres, ‘positive’ school climates, and/or ‘safe’ space (Niccolini, 2016). Such spaces can, however, work to reproduce normativities (Dumant, 2012) and offer emotional relief more for adults than youth (Stengel, 2010). Stated goals of establishing a positive school climate are often belied by a desire for unease, for students to never feel too loose, relaxed or at home in the classroom. Ahmed (2010) describes this as a ‘perverse performative’ a ‘speech act [that] brings into existence what it cannot admit that it wants, or even the very thing that is says it does not want’ (p. 201).
In another example of a perverse performative, the administration specifically objected to an image on the inside cover of the Cardinal Columns where a shirtless female student lies on top of a heap of boxes (Figure 3). The superintendent argued that some might find it disturbing to see a student ‘laying lifeless’ (quoted in Roznik, 2014a; n.p.). Kumar, pointing out a gendered double standard, argued that the Cardinal Columns had previously pictured shirtless male students on the cover in previous issues with no objections (Phillips, 2014). The editor’s page provides a rationale for the image:
At first, we conducted a photoshoot with [the student] laying lifeless in the middle of boxes. We were going to photoshop the words ‘fragile’ on the boxes. However, we did not agree with the notion that survivors of sexual assault are fragile. (Schneider & Kumar, 2014, p. 1)
I find it an interesting tension that the magazine editors intentionally sought to avoid depicting the student as lacking agency, yet the administration cite the students’ immobility as what is potentially disturbing. Rather than lifeless, the female figure’s alert gaze and tensed shoulder muscles suggest immanent action rather than passivity. Her wide-awake gaze is highly aware, almost confrontational. The staging of the image thus anticipates and then works to refuse the body’s status as a ‘lifeless’ or passive object. Mel Chen (2012) has examined how agency is often hierarchized across ranges of ‘liveness,’ ‘animacy’ and an ‘ability to act upon others’ (p. 41). A ‘lifeless’ body is a then a body that is devoid of agency. It seems ironic to deem a student’s ‘lifelessness,’ or lack of agency, inappropriate and then to use that perceived lifelessness as grounds for taking away other students’ editorial agency. Further, the blank sheet of paper draped across the student’s body invites but does not finalize a range of potential signifiers urging a non-verbal and affective reading.
In deeming the image offensive, the administration implicitly marks the female body itself as obscene, objectifying and sexualising the student pictured. Kumar sees just this objectification of women as part of what contributes to rape culture:
We are so saturated in a society that tolerates and even condones objectification of women and sexualises them to be less than human beings. I think a lot of that […] contributes to rape jokes and rape culture, and it’s not something that I could see going under the radar anymore. (quoted in KEMPA, 2014, n.p.)
The image does a great deal, to use Rebecca Coleman’s (2009) words: it reveals and hides, it presents passivity in the same breath it refutes it, it dares the reader to apply and then revise a signifier. It is these wide-ranging and contradictory affective capacities that perhaps render it so threatening to administration. The affective work of the image produces feeling subjects that are not easily managed.
Feeling subjects: implicit and affective censorship
I want to end by thinking through this notion of feeling subject through what Judith Butler (1997) in Excitable Speech calls ‘implicit censorship.’ Rather than a causal chain where prohibition follows incendiary speech, Butler argues that implicit censorship works preemptively to ‘rule out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable. In such cases, no explicit regulation is needed in which to articulate this constraint’ (p. 130). I want to extend Butler’s line of thought there to think about feelable feelings in schools. A feeling subject in school is a subject that is perhaps moved and moves through an affective intelligence rather than the contained, disembodied, and individualized rationality typically valorized in education. This ‘thinking-feeling’ (Massumi, 2015a) is not contained within individual bodies but is transmitted between bodies (Brennan, 2004) and is thus not acknowledged as part of a viable school ‘subject’ that can be marked, hierarchized, and managed. Blackman (2012) explains:
This is not just about how a body looks either to oneself or others, but rather how about how a body feels, where that feeling does not simply emanate from within (in relation to a psychological measure such as self-esteem, for example), but is rather an intensity generated between bodies. (p. 13)
In addition to censoring what was deemed ‘troubling speech’ (Boler, 2010), the Fond du Lac administration then also sought a form of affective censorship. The ‘explicit’ censorship of the school newspaper was underwritten by an implicit attempt to control and manage affects where school-positive flows of feeling were promoted and negativity was deemed an ‘interference’ to learning. The school administration thus promoted a pedagogy staked on channeling affect in particular ways. In addition to contesting what is sayable in the school, this event might prompt us to ask: How are bodies allowed to feel in schools? How much intensity between bodies is permitted? From whom? From what? Who and what is allowed to affect and be affected in learning spaces?
Butler (2004) declares that,
[t]he public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown. The limits of the sayable, the limits of what can appear, circumscribe the domain in which political speech operates and certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors. (p. xvii)
In this piece, I have explored how the public sphere is also constituted by what cannot be felt, what feelings cannot be tolerated and contained, and what objects or bodies elicit too intense feeling or too wide breaths of movement. In this event, (school) subjects and bodies that produced too much intensity were actively silenced. A frustrated Jezebel commentator wrote:
Amazing how they can try to silence an article about rape culture and NOT see the irony. (Rose, 2014)
Indeed, it’s almost like a bad joke.