Emotions in the Classroom: And the Institutional Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

We now live in a temporal and cultural context in which emotions have changed places with reason to become an explicit, legitimate topic of discussion, of intervention, of manipulation and instrumentalisation. From being that which the modern rational unitary bourgeois subject strenuously denied or warded off, in the inexhaustible postmodern search for new technologies-for managing oneself or others-the repressed has been returned from the margins to a new and central market niche. No longer the opposite of reason, emotions are now seen as its indispensable ally, which-as the books on topics such as 'emotional intelligence' indicate-are amenable to application and technologisation. Emotions have even become separable from the people expressing them: for where once the notion of 'emotion mapping' would have evoked cognitive psychoeducational training, it now describes the superimposition of lm star's faces and reactions onto the stunt people performing their actions in best-seller movies.This might sound like a cynical place to start for a feminist academic committed to acknowledging the emotional character of research, teaching and learning processes; and a psychotherapist facilitating groups to explore their covert emotional tensions and themes. But we cannot ignore the broader socio-political conditions that foster the emergence of such academic and therapeutic contexts. Rather, these rare ed arenas are themselves perhaps merely the more exclusive places for the practice of the 'psy complex' (Rose, 1985(Rose, , 1990, with TV talk shows and shrink thriller lms and self help manuals forming the popular cultural climate for attending to, managing and improving one's 'self' and relationships (see broader discussion in Squire, 2001).But there is one further element in this complex cocktail of current cultural continuities between de nitions of therapeutic and educational knowledge that I want to mention before moving on. This is the elusive presence and absence of 'gender'-and here we might also want to consider how gender is typically foregrounded to stand in for other characteristics of 'otherness'. The clichéd association of women and femininity with the emotional is often taken as symptomatic of all that has been othered by the normalisation of white, middle class Euro-US experience within psychological, legal and bureaucratic models (e.g., Pateman, 1989;Broughton, 1988;Walkerdine, 1988), giving rise to claims of women 's 'different' voices (Gilligan, 1982) or gender-speci c relations to ethics and politics (see discussion in Bowden, 1997). Within psychoanalysis 'hysterical' women occupy a unique role in its epistemophilic generation (Moi, 1989), while Lacanian formulations position the analysand as speaking within the discourse of the hysteric (Fink, 1999).Clearly we are now a long way from xing feminine genres onto women (as the recent cases of men murdering as a result of unwelcome disclosures on the Jerry Springer Show testify). Indeed talk of the feminisation of labour itself highlights how the casual,

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Institutional creativity and pathologies of potential space: The modern university

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