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" The Erotics of Pedagogical Spaces: "
Misra, Akanksha
Ramamurthy, Priti
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1107686
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2453797068
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| Main Entry
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Misra, Akanksha
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Ramamurthy, Priti
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| Title & Author
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The Erotics of Pedagogical Spaces:\ Misra, AkankshaRamamurthy, Priti
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| College
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University of Washington
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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306
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| Abstract
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This dissertation examines how everyday schooling practices in India and Turkey create normative gendered and sexual citizens, erasing the complicated histories of caste, class, race, religion, gender, and national belonging that constitute the sexual body. It draws on theoretical insights from postcolonial and indigenous feminist, feminist phenomenological, sexuality studies, and critical race/caste scholars to conceptualize the historical, racial, desiring body as always becoming and transforming itself and the world. Based on three years of extensive participant observations in schools and interviews with teachers, school administrators, non-profit workers, government officials, and education scholars in Istanbul, Hyderabad and New Delhi, this dissertation places corporeality and erotics at the center of analyses of schooling practices. It makes three major scholarly interventions. First, I argue that the body needs to be understood as a historical racial corporeal schema that is co-constituted by histories and articulations of race and nation and understands itself as such. I demonstrate the limits of the objective, individual, scientific, biological model of the body, which is a historical product of the project of European colonialism, nationalism and modernizing ideologies and institutions, including schools. Understanding the body as objective and biological entails ignoring the consequent biological teleologies of childhood development and civilizational narratives of progress which maintain violent hierarchies of patriarchy, race and heteronormativity. By showing adult educators’ failure to engage with the sensorial ways that children understand self and belonging to each other, nation and the world and their desiring excesses, I reveal how schooling and even progressive lessons like comprehensive sexuality education continue to understand the body as biological and thereby maintain historical biases of race and belonging in the name of development and ‘proper’, moral, sexual citizenship. Secondly, and based on the body as a historical racial corporeal schema, I propose gender as a lived, phenomenological experience. Drawing on in-depth interviews with experienced school teachers, I demonstrate how gender as their lived bodily experience is always shifting subjectivities or “becoming” and is always experienced based on their own historical corporeal schemas and relations to others. While gender maintains articulations of caste and (new) middle class belonging, the corporeal excesses of these women’s lives also challenge hierarchies and linear spatiotemporalities of time and modern schooling. Finally, I draw on the theorization of the body as a historical racial corporeal schema, body becoming, and excess desire and flow of sensorial connections to imagine unruly, uncivilized possible lifeworlds. I urge transnational feminist scholarship to harness a form of critical feminist praxis that doesn’t assume the separation of nation, borders and subjectivities but rather takes the body as the site where the (trans)national is lived and transformed in the everyday and is inseparable from historical articulations and unruly, inarticulable, corporeal excesses.
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Gender studies
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Sexuality
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Womens studies
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