Desire, Disgust, and Disrepair: The Body in Education

Stephanie Springgay—Sylvia Wilson Kind
Department of Curriculum Studies
The University of British Columbia

What draws us together is an interest in the liminal sites of pedagogy—sites that live on the edges—trembling in the tensions midst the expected and the unexpected. Engaging in an interplay of (re) reading and (not) knowing as/in complicated conversations, we seek to invoke fragments of theoretical traces and live(d) experience through (ex)citations. The ‘re’ in re-reading tales on paratextual performativity. Ar/rhythmics of doubled movements running with and against lines of separation as/in writer/reader boundaries. The text—an invitation into the chiasmatic flow of conversation—into the gaps of the intervals—always already open to moments of living pedagogy. (Aoki, Low & Palulis, 2001)

précis: a concise summary of a text; an abstract

precipice: a perilous situation; on the edge

In curriculum studies that focus on classroom relationships that include bodies—their physical surfaces, encounters that produce narratives, memories, and emotions, and spaces that mediate, regulate, and shape—one almost invariably finds references to the act of repair, to healing, to nurturing, and to care. Yet, such insightful pedagogical moves leave absent desire, disgust and disrepair, understanding these conditions as dangerous excess and difficult knowledge. Education in practice and in theory often closes openings, reporting on practice and providing concrete answers. It seals over the sutured scars of trauma, loss, and memory, while disciplining and controlling bodies to accept normalized practices and understandings.

Our separate but interwoven art making, researching, and teaching practices embrace desire, disgust and disrepair not as abject leakages, but rather as spaces that perform and invite engagement. We contend that this active, performative and aesthetic encounter includes the “underside” of teaching, keeping open spaces in educational discourse for bodies to move, to mutate, and to touch in a contiguous relationship. Encounters that are open to desire, disgust, and disrepair do not leave absent their opposites, but rather these encounters move in the spaces in/between dualisms and rest on the edges of these boundaries. It is an inquiry that resides in the separate distinctions of comfort and discomfort and in the tensions between the two. It is a meeting, which involves surprise and conflict (Ahmed, 2000), a coming together, a touching, and a pulling apart. It is through an attunement to the relationships between dualisms and an attention to the edges of these boundaries that knowledge shifts, reverberates, and un/ravels. In this act of doubling: “dualisms become clear before blurring, interconnecting, blending one into/through the other, only to return to clarity and then ambiguity/complexity again, in an endless hermeneutic circle” (Springgay, Irwin, & Wilson, 2003).

Engaged with the practice of a/r/tography (Irwin & de Cosson, in press; Springgay, Irwin, & Wilson, 2003) our art making, researching, and teaching embraces this doubling act of knowing and not knowing while illuminating the possibilities of what it might be. As a research methodology a/r/tography is a living practice of inquiring in the world through art and text, and through a contiguous relationship of the roles artist/ researcher/ teacher. Our conference presentation moved fluidly between, within, and outside of these spaces and it is our intention to create a similar “rendering” here. The images that are presented in this electronic format are not representations of textual acts, nor does the written word illustrate the visual. Instead it is in the inter-action and the movement between art and writing, between the roles of artist/ researcher/ teacher that our “textual” becomes a live(d), pedagogical, and artistic endeavour. This doubling resists transparent re-readings and re-writings of experience, preferring complexities and the process of complicating (Aoki, Low, Paulis, 2001). It is the relations made possible by their coming together and apart that audience enters alongside the artist/ author and into the struggle of loss and disruption. Our hope is to engage in questions with and in/ between desire, disgust and disrepair in education but to also inquire into the processes and practices of being an artist, a researcher and a teacher.

The images and textual rendering emanate from multiple aesthetic explorations and are not intended to be “read” or understood as one cohesive narrative. Rather the non/linearity of our visual and bodied stories is fragmented, porous, and open. The context of our presentation was to provoke curriculum, to ask questions about bodies and education, and the role of visual art inquiry and as a response to research and to teaching. To contextualize the images an annotated list appears at the end of this paper not to limit an understanding of the artworks, nor to suggest their representativeness, but to invite, to call, to respond, and to keep open the possibility of a bodied encounter with our work.