interrogating \"teacher identity\": emotion, resistance, and self-formation

$: INTERROGATING \"TEACHER IDENTITY\": EMOTION, RESISTANCE, AND SELF-FORMATION$
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INTERROGATING "TEACHER IDENTITY I f :

Michalinos Zembylas Department of Teacher Education

Michigan State University

EMOTION, RESISTANCE, AND SELF-FORMATION

INTRODUCTION

A recurring theme in contemporary pedagogical circles is the "teacher-self/" along with several concepts that cluster around it - identity, individuality, fulfillment. One premise underlying discussions of the teacher-self (at least in the context of contemporary Western Europe and North America) is that the teacher is an autonomous individual, constantly moving between the need to connect with other colleagues and the need to maintain a sense of individuality.' In this formulation, the teacher-self is "coherent, bounded, individualized, intentional, the locus of thought, action, and belief, the origin of its own actions, the beneficiary of a unique biographyff2 - she or he is assumed to possess a consistent identity (a "teacher identity") that serves as the repository of particular experiences in classrooms and schools, the site of thoughts, attitudes, emotions, beliefs, and values.

Some question these assumptions in developing alternative ways to think about the teacher-self. Narrative research, for example, has prompted educators to explore teacher identity formation as articulated through talk, social interaction, and self- presentation. Such research highlights the situatedness of self: Personal narratives develop through communication in response to situations, practices, and available reso~rces.~ Postmodemist and poststructuralist views problematize the aforemen- tioned assumptions about the teacher-self by reconceptualizing the self as a form of working subjectivity. Drawing upon such views, one can formulate a teacher-self that is a polysemic product of experience, a product of practices that constitute this self in response to multiple meanings that need not converge upon a stable, unified id en tit^.^ 1. David Geoffrey Smith, "Identity, Self, and Other in the Conduct of Pedagogical Action: An East/West Inquiry," lournal of Curriculum Theorizing 12, no. 3 (1996): 6-12.

2. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. This book will be cited as 10 in the text for all subsequent references. 3. Several ethnographic as well as theoretical accounts emphasize the situatedness of the teacher-self. See, for example, Katherine Carter, "The Place of Story in the Study of Teaching and Teacher Education," Educational Researcher 22, no.11 ( 1993): 5-12; Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, Teochers' Profes- sional Knowledge Landscapes (New York Teachers College Press, 1995); Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, "Stories to Live by: Narrative Understandings of School Reform," Curriculum Inquiry28 11998): 149-164; Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, Shaping a Professional Identity: Stories of Educational Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); and George Feuerverger, "On the Edges of the Map: A Study of Heritage Language Teachers in Toronto," Teaching and Teacher Education 13 (1997): 39-53. 4. James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium, The Self That We Live by: Narrative Identity in the Postmodern World (New York Oxford University Press, 2000).

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This constant construction, destruction, and repair of boundaries around the constitution of the self is fraught with emotion^.^ Emotions [as well as thoughts and actions) are part of the very fabric constituting the self, but they are also socially organized and managed through “social conventions, community scrutiny, legal norms, familial obligations and religious injunctions.”6 Thus, power and resistance are at the center of understanding the place of emotion in self-formation.

This essay interrogates the place of emotion in teacher identity formation. My main interest is the political dimension of how emotions constitute identities and how these identities are assigned to teachers through discourses, practices, and performances. If these are understood, then the subsequent question is, What possibilities are opened for teachers to become coauthors of their own narratives and performances? Using the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Nikolas Rose on strategies of resistance and self-formation, I want to explore the possibility for action that “care of the teacher-self” (as opposed to ”knowing the self”) invokes through making sense of emotional experiences in teaching.’ This approach differs fundamentally from liberal inlvidualism or a humanist/critical discourse that advocates self-understanding and autonomy as a result of self-reflection on one’s emotions. Instead, my argument is that, while much of teaching experience is deeply imbued with normalizing power, the negotiation of subjectivity and emotion provides spaces for self-formation and resistance. But in order to understand teacher identity in this different way, we need to re-theorize the role emotion plays in constituting the teacher-self.

Describing the teacher-self as constituted suggests that the relation of teacher to self is historical rather than ontological. Emphasizing the historical contingency of the teacher-self avoids the problematics of normalizing identity and allows teachers a broader range of strategies to negotiate their relations with others and with themselves. If they recognize this contingency, teachers can move beyond dog- matic conceptions of identity that delimit their potential responses to their social positioning. This theoretical perspective challenges the assumption that there is a singular “teacher-self” or an essential “teacher identity” hidden beneath the surface of teachers’ experiences, an assumption evident in popular cultural myths about teaching (such as the idea that the teacher is the expert or that the teacher is self-

5. Diane Margolis, The Fabric of Self: A Theory of Ethics and Emotions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

6. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London and New York Routledge, 1990), 1.

7. Cris Mayo discusses the importance in Foucault’s work of the concept of “care of the self” rather than “know thyself” in “The Uses of Foucault,” Educational Theory 50, no. 1 (2000): 103-1 16. See also James Marshall, Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Educatzon (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996); and Frank Pignatelli, “What Can I Do? Foucault on Freedom and the Question of Teacher Agency,” Educational Theory 43, no. 4 (1993): 411-432.

MICHALINOS ZEMBYLAS is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Education at Michigan State University, 325 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824. His primary areas of scholarship are emotions in education, science education, and philosophy of education.

ZEMBYLAS Interrogating “Teacher Identity” 109

made).8 My focus, rather, is on exploring the messy meanings of teacher identity as it comes to be constituted through social interactions, performances, and daily negotiations within a school culture that privileges emotional self-discipline and autonomy (for example, where female elementary school teachers are expected to be “caring” and “compassionate”). Described in this manner, identity is not a preexisting, stable element that becomes disciplined through discourses and practices of emotion, but something that is constituted through power relations.

The first two sections of this essay lay out the general context for this study and its philosophical assumptions regarding emotion, its place in teaching, and its link with identity and subjectivity. The next section addresses how these perspectives illuminate an understanding of the constitution of teacher subjectivities through a variety of discursive practices and performances at school, especially those exempli- fying emotional rules regarding emotion management, The final section discusses possibilities of action toward the care of the teacher-self opened up by an interroga- tion of such emotion discourses, performances, and practices, and how these resistances may express and encourage new forms of teacher subjectivity.

SITUATING THE STUDY

Recently, educators have become increasingly interested about the place of emotion in teaching. Several empirical and theoretical studies have provided detailed accounts of teachers’ emotions and the role they play in teachers’ professional and personal development.y Many of these studies are inspired by sociological, feminist, and poststructuralist theories on emotion. Most sociological studies on this subject emphasize how teacher emotions are socially constructed but assume a givenness to teacher self and identity - the processes of social construction pertain only to how social situations shape the expression and experience of teachers’ emotional states. On the other hand, most feminist and poststructuralist studies examine the role of culture, power, and ideology in creating emotion discourses; they highlight how teachers participate in this process by adopting or resisting these dominant discourses. Such studies emphasize the role of language and social practices and avoid privileging self-consciousness.’O

8. Deborah Britzman makes this argument in her articles “The Terrible Problem of Knowing Thyself Toward a Poststructuralist Account of Teacher Identity,” [ournal of Curriculum Theorizing 9, no. 3 (1993): 23-46; and “Cultural Myths in the Making of a Teacher: Biography and Social Structure in Teacher Education,” Harvard Educational Review 56 (f986): 442-456. 9. See, for example, Jill Blackmore, ”Doing ’Emotional Labour’ in the EducationMarket Place: Stories from the Field of Women in Management,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 17 (1996): 337449; Andy Hargreaves, “The Emotional Practice of Teaching,” Teaching and Teacher Educution 14 (1998): 835-854; Jennifer Nias, ”Thinking About Feeling: The Emotions in Teaching,” Cambridge Iournal of Education 26 (1996): 293-306; and Michelle Schmidt, “Role Theory, Emotions, and Identity in the Department Headship of Secondary Schooling,” Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000): 827-842.

10. Megan Boler’s work is a notable contribution to this topic. See Megan Boler, “Disciplined Emotions: Philosophies of Educated Feelings,” Educational Theory 47, [ 1997): 203-227; ”License to Feel: Teaching in the Context of War(s),” in Articulating the Global and the Local, eds. Ann Cretkovich and Douglas Kellner (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), 226-243; “Taming the Labile Other: Disciplined Emotions in Popular and Academic Discourses,” in Philosophy of Education 1997: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, ed. Susan Laird (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1997), 41-25; ”Towards a Politics of Emotion: Bridging the Chasm Between Theory


In adopting this poststructuralist framework, I recognize the importance of avoiding “discourse determinism” [that is, the belief that everything can be reduced to discourse). The central argument of a poststructuralist perspective is that emotion is a “discursive practice.” Such an approach emphasizes the role language and culture play in constructing the experience of emotion. Emotion functions as a discursive practice in which emotional expression is productive - that is to say, it makes individuals into socially and culturally specific persons. Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz argue that such an understanding of emotion “leads us to a more complex view of the multiple, shifting, and contested meanings possible in emotional utterances and interchanges, and from there to a less monolithic concept of emotion.” l1 This conception of emotion, however, requires that performativity and emotion embodiment be incorporated into a broader understanding of the teacher- self, a point I will explore further in the next section.

My conception of emotion rests on four important assumptions:

1. Emotions are not private or universal and are not impulses that simply happen to passive sufferers (the Aristotelian view). Instead, emotions are constituted through language and refer to a wider social life. This view challenges any sharp distinction between the “private” domain (the existentialist and the psychoana- lytic concern) and the “public” domain (the structuralist concern).

2. Power relations are inherent in “emotion talk” and shape the expression of emotions by permitting us to feel some emotions while prohibiting others (for example, through moral norms, explicit social values such as efficiency, and so on}.

3. Using emotions, one can create sites of social and political resistances. For example, feminist poststructuralist criticism exposes contradictions within discourses of emotions, thus identlfying “counterbalancing discoursesN or “disrupting discourses.”12 These counter-discourses are sites of resistance and self-formation.

4. Finally, it is important to recognize the role of the body in emotional experience. This view is not related to any notion of emotion as “inherent” but emphasizes how embodiment is integral to self-fornation. If emotion is understood as corporeal and performative, then the subject appears in a new light, in a way that rejects the individualized psychological self.I3

and Practice,“ APA Newsletters 98 (1998): 49-54; and Feeling Power: Emotions andEducation (New York: Routledge, 1999).

11. Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz, “Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life,” in Language and the Politics of Emotion, eds. Lutz and Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),2. In this collection, Lutz and Abu-Lughod emphasize the argument that emotion is a discursive practice.

12. See, for example, Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990). In this book, Walkerdine discusses how multiple, contradictory discourses in the classroom constitute subjectification processes for the teacher and students.

13. Elizabeth Grosz analyzes the importance of emotion embodiment and subjectivity in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994).

ZEMBYLAS Interrogating ”Teacher Identity” 1 1 1

By using the preceding set of assumptions to study teacher emotions, we can move beyond theories that psychologize emotions and treat them as internalized (such as psychoanalysis) or structural theories that emphasize how “structures” shape the individual (such as Marxism). In my conception of emotion, teacher emotions are not private, nor merely the effects of outside structures, nor simply language-laden, but are “embodied” and ”performative”: the ways in which teachers understand, experience, perform, and talk about emotions are highly related to their sense of body. Teacher identity can be studied in the classroom and other school settings where teachers are emotionally engaged in how their selves come to be constituted, By recognizing the role power relations play in constructing emotions, my conception of emotion directs attention to an exploration of the personal, cultural, political, and historical aspects of teacher identity formation. For this reason, I term this work “genealogies of emotions in teaching.” My aim is to explore the conditions under which teachers’ emotions are shaped and performed, to discover how they might be “disciplined,” to destabilize and denaturalize the regime that demands the expression of certain emotions and the disciplining of others, and to elucidate the “emotional rules” that are imposed and the boundaries entailed by those rules. The place of emotion in teacher self-formation plays a central role in the circuits of power that constitute some teacher-selves while denying others. Criti- cally understanding these processes of discipline and domination is crucial if we are to promote the possibility of new forms of subjectivity.

EMOTION AND SUBJECTIVITY THE LINK BETWEEN EMOTION AND IDENTITY

One must understand the link between subjectivity and emotion in order to understand the ways in which emotions as discursive practices and performances are productive and how they are related to power, The very identification of one’s emotions and experiences -however one wishes to define emotions - depends on the identity of the person whose emotions and experiences they are.14 Emphasizing the centrality of identity in this manner raises two major points of debate about identity formation. First, how valid is it to claim that an individual is the same or virtually the same over time - or is the notion of a fixed and stable identity an illusion? Second, to what extent is identity formed as an individual project, to what extent is it a function of socialization into particular sociocultural and political contexts, and to what extent is it a combination of both?

These questions have been debated since Aristotle. Two familiar traditions in these debates are (1) the psychological/philosophical tradition of identity formation, emphasizing a process centered on the individual and her or his self-reflections through the mirror of human nature (personal identity); and (2) the sociological/ anthropological view of identity, emphasizing an interaction between the individual and culture (social and cultural identity). Both of these views assume that one’s

14. Peter Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959). Strawson built his theory of individuality and personhood upon this feature of identity - that is, the sense of having a location in space, a point of view.

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identity is knowable in itself and that it has a core, if one could only find the way to it.15

An investigation of identity formation, in either tradition, calls for the acknowl- edgment of emotion. Emotion and identity are social as much as they are individual. For example, in an environment in which particular emotions must be suppressed, issues of emotion and identity lead directly to the question of what is “appropriate,” which in turn leads to the question how acceptable emotional stances and identities get defined. In other words, maintaining “appropriate” behavior (and discourse) comes to be seen as reinforcing the hegemony of certain rules or norms. Like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, identities are at once individual and social; they are the affective intersection of life experiences variably salient in any given circumstance.I6 Identity consists of what we know best about our relations to self, others, and the world, yet it is often constituted by the things we are least able to talk about. Identity is grounded in multiple ways of knowing, with affective and direct experiential knowledge often being paramount. As I will argue later, the crucial link between identity formation and emotion lies in the performative character of emotion, which makes it a particularly affective and direct way of knowing.

Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Markus tell us that “if we assume that the emotional experiences that affirm the cultural frame are those that will be high- lighted and emphasized [by a given cultural group], then certain social behavior that elicits, fosters or reflects the focal emotions should be relatively common.”“ Jeanette Haviland and Patricia Kahlbaugh remind us further that “in the sense that sociologists and anthropologists describe the emergence of sociocultural structure from individual structures, there is a reverse process in which cultural structure dictates the individual.”1s Given that “identities are always collective and relational,” it can be argued that “personal” and ”social” identities evolve largely out of the genealogy of how “emotions have been responded to, elicited, shaped, and ~ocialized.”~9 In other words, just as “subjectification is simultaneously individual- izing and collectivizing,” emotion is both personal and social.2o The processes of emotion formation are fundamentally interrelated with the formation of identity.

15. Smith, “Identity, Self, and Other in the Conduct of Pedagogical Action: An East/West Inquiry,” 6. 16. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1977). 17. Shinohu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus, “Introduction to Cultural Psychology and Emotion Research,” in Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence, eds. Kitayama and Markus (Washington: American Psychological Association, 19941, ID. 18. Jeanette Haviland and Patricia Kahlbaugh, “Emotion aad Identity,” in Handbook of Emotions, eds. Michael Lewis and Jeanette Haviland [New York: The Guilford Press, 19931,329. 19. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization [Minneapalis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), mi; and Haviland and Kahlbaugh, “Emotion and Identity,” 338. 20. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19991, 46.

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PROBLEMATIZING EMOTION AND SDJECTMTY FROM A FOUCAULDIAN PERSPECTTVE

Beyond the psychological/philosophical and the sociological/anthropological views of identity, a third view is inspired by the writings of Foucault, who interro- gated the discursive and disciplinary places from which questions of self are posed and insisted that it is impossible to claim any originary self that is coherent and unified. In Foucault’s writings, the unified self is challenged and fragmented; he uses the term /’subjectivity” instead of “selfhood” or ”self-identity” to describe the manifold ways in which individuals are historically constituted. The concept of subjectivity implies that self-identity, like society and culture, is fractured, multiple, contradictory, contextual, and regulated by social norms. Subjectivity is produced, negotiated, and reshaped through discursive practices. As such, the self is continuously constituted, never completed, never fully coherent, never completely centered securely in experience. Foucault does not refer to any primordial experience but to the relations between forms of subjectivity and kinds of normalizing practices.21 The self appears to be a contingent, heterogeneous, political, relational, culturally relative notion, dependent upon cultural beliefs and values.

In his later work, especially in the three volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued for a view of power so pervasive that there is no space left for an individual to look for a “true self.”22 All aspects of an individual’s life are subject to disciplinary formation, in Foucault’s view; the very experience of being a subject is an outcome of discursive practices. This work raises crucial questions about the role of discourses of emotion: “How are these discourses used? What role do they play in society?” Such questions allow theorists to problematize assumptions and expectations about emotion talk and the ways emotions are expressedin order to reveal the role power relations and ideology play in the formation of emotions as discursive practices. Foucault suggested that we need to trace the constitution of the self within a historical framework of how meaning intersects with experience, regarding others and ourselves as both objects and subjects of experience - as simultaneously a subject and subject Consequently, the focus of analysis of the self and one’s experiences is the discourse of experience rather than the experience itself. The

21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure [New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

22. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction [New York: Vintage Books, 1990); The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure [New York: Vintage Books, 1990)) The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self [New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 23. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xxv. 24. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), in which Foucault noted, ”For a long time ordinary individuality - the everyday individuality of everybody - remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege.. ..[The disciplinary methods] reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.. ..This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification andsubjectification,” 191. SeealsoMichel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” inArtAfter Postmoder~ism, ed. Brian Wallis [Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 198211984), 417432.


experience itself does not constitute self-knowledge. Only by interrogating the discursive place from which questions of identity are posed can we trace how identity is subjected to the social and historical context of practices and discourse^.^^ For Foucault, discourses do not simply reflect or describe reality, knowledge, experience, self, social relations, social institutions, and practices; rather, they play an integral role in constituting (and being constituted by) them. In and through these discourses we ascribe to ourselves bodily feelings, emotions, intentions, and all the other psychological attributes that have for so long been attributed to a unified self.

Thus, a Foucauldian perspective on subjectivity and emotion rejects the notion of a ”real,” “true,” or “authentic” self constructed from one’s emotional experiences: ”Its authenticities are situated and plural - locally articulated, locally recognized, and locally accountable. Self no longer references an experientially constant entity, a central presence or presences, but, rather, stands as a practical discursive accomplishment.”% Nor is this accomplishment a final, settled state of affairs; the contextual perspective on the self is concerned with how subjectivities are constantly “becoming” (to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s term) - that is, how they are continuously reconstituted. This “becoming” is not a correspondence between relations, nor a resemblance, an imitation, or an identification: ”To become is not to progress or regress along a series.. . .Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ’pr~ducing.’”~~ The use of ”becoming” to describe subjectivity highlights its dynamic character. Even small events within a particular cultural and political context play a significant role in this dynamic of change: “As each of us struggles in the process of coming to know, we struggle not as autonomous beings who single- handedly perform singular fates, but as vulnerable social subjects who produce and are being produced by culture.”28

Recent work in poststructuralist theory and ethnography addresses the crucial role emotions play in forming subjectivitie~.~~ Such work provides narrative accounts of the subjectificationprocess andhighlights the impossibility of establishing clear boundaries between the personal and the social character of self-formation. An integrated “personal” and ”social” identity evolves largely out of a context that is shaped by and shapes certain power relations:

power relations determine what can, cannot, or must be said about self and emotion, what is taken to be true or false about them, and what only some individuals can say about them.. . .The

25. Homi Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity,“ in Identity, ed. Lisa Appignaesi (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1987), 5-11.

26. Holstein and Gubrium, The Self That W e Live by, 70. 27. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238-239.

28. Britzman, “The Terrible Problem of Knowing Thyself,” 28.

29. See, for example, Norman Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the Twenty- First Century (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1997); Holstein and Gubrium, The Self That W e Live by; Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein, eds., Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World (New York Oxford University Press, 200lj; and Laurel Richardson, Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

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real innovation is in showing how emotion discourses establish, assert, challenge, or reinforce power or status differences.3O

Emotions are discursive practices operating in circumstances that grant powers to some relations and delimit the powers of others, that enable some to create truth and others to submit to it, that allow some to judge and others to be judged. Consequently, selfhood and emotions must be understood as properties of conversa- tions rather than of mental mechanisms (ro, 175-177). The words used to describe emotions are not simply names for “emotion entities,” preexisting things with coherent characteristics; rather, these words are themselves “actions or ideological practices” that serve specific purposes in the process of creating and negotiating reality.3l None of this precludes the everyday phenomenological significance of emotion, however. My concern is to avoid the notion of a “true” (emotional) self that is articulated solely within phenomenological accounts, and instead to stress a perspective on subjectivity and emotion that sees them as dynamic and shifting things that are both producing people assumed to be “subjects” and produced by them.32 In this sense, subjects do their emotions; emotions do not just happen to them. This is precisely where an examination of how and why subjects are constituted as such opens the possibility of creating new forms of subjectivity.

In this way, emotion and the self are inextricably bound, so that essentializing one or the other separately is meaningless and makes it more difficult to understand or to change how they are constituted. But does this Foucauldian perspective on emotion and subjectivity leave room for agency? It is well-known that Foucault rejected the liberal notion of transcendent human agency as well as the phenomenological assumption that human subjects can remake themselves and their realities simply through social communication. Instead, Foucault saw subjectivity as constituted by discursive practices ”that inscribe bodies and thus subjugate people through processes that produce subjectivity.”% Building on this idea, Butler notes that ”[tlhe subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelli- gible invocation of identity.”34 Yet, Foucault’s inquiry does not preclude the possibility of agency. It may seem that he does, because he does not offer strategies for resistance - but this is because, for him, offering specific strategies would ignore the contextual character of power. Instead, his notion of agency has a completely different meaning, one that avoids the twin determinisms of normalizing power or the uncritical adoption of self-consciousness. Foucault maintained that “where

30. Abu-Lughod and Lutz, “Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life,” 14. 31. Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 32. Jeff Hearn makes this argument in “Emotive Subjects: Organizational Men, Organizational Masculini- ties and the (DeJconstruction of ’Emotions,”’ in Emotion in Organizations, ed. Stephen Finernan (London: Sage, 19931, 142-166.

33. Lew Zipin, “Looking for Sentient Life in Discursive Practices: The Question of Human Agency in Critical Theories and School Research,“ in Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education, eds. Thomas S . Popkewitz and Marie Brennan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998J, 321.

34. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990/1999J, 189.


there is power there is resistance, ” suggesting that power and resistance together define agency; the notion that self-identity or agency exists prior to the interplay between power and resistance is ~roblematic .~~ As Cris Mayo explains, positing the idea that identity comes before acting

falsely equates self-understandmg with the ability to remove from one’s situation, as if self- consciousness could remake the world that precedes the subject.. ..[S]ubjectification takes place in a context where limited and delimited identity categories are all that is available.. , .The great struggle to find freedom in identity, according to Foucault, leads to a category whose limits preclude freedom.36

Attending to the local manifestations of power allows one to track resistances, to be critical, and to develop strategies for constituting a new “politics of truth”: ”The problem is not changing people’s consciousness - or what’s in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.ff37 In other words, people choose among various discourses that are available to them or act to resist those discourses. From a Foucauldian perspective, no discourse is inherently liberating or oppressive:

The very same ideas and practices can be liberating and potentially dangerous, and they can do this at the same time because they begin to circulate through the social body of the opposition as an unquestioned truth. To point out the potential danger of the counter-position is not to reject, for example, subject integration but to emphasize that it is dangerous to naively believe in its good.a8

Agenealogy of emotions in teaching identifies these possibilities and reminds us that we have the potential to struggle against normalization, subvert emotional rules, and free ourselves. Before exploring these possibilities, however, it is worth examining how understanding emotion as performative changes the nature of these strategies for resistance.

EMOTION AS PERFORMATIVE While there is much of value in focusing on discourse, an understanding of

emotion based only on subjectificationas a matter of language is, in my view, partial. What needs to be clarified is the role emotions play in the fabric of practices in our everyday lives. Viewing emotion as either “innate” or purely socially constructed is, as I have argued, problematic. The link between emotion and subjectivity has less to do with what kind of subject is produced than with what we are enabled to do through emotions as part of the constitution of our subjectivity. As Rose contends, ”Subjectification is not to be understood by locating it in a universe of meaning or an interactional context of narratives, but in a complex of apparatuses, practices, machinations, and assemblages within which human being has been fabricated, and which presuppose and enjoin particular relations with ourselves’’ (10, 10). Such practices include those programs, strategies, and tactics for “ the conduct of conduct”

35. Foucault The History of Sexuality, Volume One, 95. 36. Mayo, “The Uses of Foucault,” 105.

37. Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, Volume One, 135.

38. Ingolfur Asgeir Johannesson, “Genealogy and Progressive Politics: Reflections on the Notion of Usefulness,” inFoucault’s Challenge, eds. Popkewitz and Brennan, 307. See also Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York Routledge, 1991).

ZEMBYLAS Interrogating ”Teacher Identity” 11 7

- that is, for acting upon the actions of others in order to achieve certain Thus, if we want to explore emotional utterances and acts, we need to analyze emotion talk and gestures in terms of the practices within which we are addressed andlocated, not onlyintermsof thelanguageweuse. Suchanapproachproblematizes the embodiment and performance of emotion without attaching any essences to ”the body.”

As should be clear, my reference to the body does not imply a bounded unity but a particular set of assemblages that emphasize what a body is capable of doing and, consequently, what an embodied emotion can do. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, the body

is not an organic totality which is capable of the wholesale expression of subjectivity, a welling up of the subject‘s emotions, attitudes, beliefs, or experiences, but is itself an assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures, passions, activities, behaviors, linked by fine lines and unpredictable networks to other elements, segments and assemblage^.^^

This theoretical move requires us to view the link between emotion and subjectivity as more than purely discursive.

Another important consequence of this move is that it requires us to focus not only on what emotional utterances mean, but on what they do: what components of emotion they connect and what connections they do not permit; how they enable humans to feel, to desire, and to experience disappointment and fulfillment. In brief, this view theorizes emotion as performance. On the one hand, emotions motivate and accompany the performances of subjectivity; on the other hand, emotions are constituted, established, and even reformulated by these performances.

The work of Foucault and Butler lays the groundwork for theorizing the meaning of “performance” here. Butler views the body and mind as alternative surfaces for signifying identity. Extending Foucault’s assertion that “the body is the inscribed surface of events,”41 Butler notes that

acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce thison the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, areperformative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.42

Butler proposes this notion of performativity in developing an analysis of gender as performance, but the theoretical point applies to other dimensions of identity as well. She conceives performativity as ongoing discursive acts that are signifying

39. Rose, Governing the Soul 40. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994),120. See also Rose, Inventing Ourselves, 184.

41. Michel Foucault, ”Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York Pantheon Books, 1984), 83,76100. For more on discussion of the body and performance in Foucault and Butler, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One; Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, ” in Michel Foucault, eds. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 229-252; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theorms in Subjection (Stanford Stanford University Press, 1997); and Butler, Gender Trouble. 42. Butler, Gender Trouble, 173 (emphasis in original].


practices within social, cultural, and political contexts. She describes it as a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning, arguing that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said it be its results. Thus, the historicity of norms (for example, emotional rules) constitutes the power of discourse to enact what it names:

A performative act is one which brings into being or enacts that which it names, and so marks the constitutive or productive power of discourse .... For a performative to work, it must draw upon and recite a set of linguistic conventions that have traditionally worked to bind or engage certain kinds of effects.4.?

But by continuing to emphasize the linguistic, this notion of performativity limits the theorization of emotion and subjectivity as assemblages of forces, energies, and surfaces. Butler refuses to recognize a human condition outside of any originating linguistic action.

Despite its weaknesses, however, Butler’s notion of performativity serves two important functions: first, it enables us to problematize the place of emotion in the constitution of performative subjectivity as something more than discursive practice; second, it suggests a different conceptualization of agency that enriches our theorization of the role emotion plays in the practices of subjectification and the possibilities for action. Butler argues that it is a mistake to presume

that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency .... The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because sigmfication is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects ....‘[ Algency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetitiomM

To put it another way, because agency is itself an outcome of practices of subjectification, there is no need to posit agency as prior to that which constitutes it [that is, as something transcendental to what happens).

Butler’s analysis of agency as constituted is critical to the conception of performativity, but to avoid the limitations of focusing primarily on performance as a discursive practice, we must also integrate Rose’s notion of how people become embodied assemblages that “link up ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ -visions, sounds, aromas, touches, collections together with other elements, machinating desires, affections, sadness, terror even death” (10, 1851. This integration emphasizes how the enact- ment of emotion and subjectivity are embodied affairs and how there is a continual rediscovery of emotions as embodied performances or assemblages that are en- meshed in the spaces, meanings, ambiguities, and contradictions of culture. All of these are interrelated in ways that cannot easily be separated from each other because they are part of the same phenomenon of performance. “Performative subjectivity” and “emotion as performative” become practices, ways of knowing, machinations of intensities, energies, words, habits and interactions, and forms of embodied assemblages that constitute us as subjects (10, 172-174).

43. Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions: A PhiIosophical Exchange, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Diane Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1995), 134.

44. Butler, Gender Trouble, 182, 185 (emphasis in original).


Three inseparable assumptions concerning the concept of “performance” are important in this theorizing of emotion as performative rather than simply as a discursive practice: ( 1 ) performativity is a speech act, a way of doing things with words; (2) it has indissoluble affinities withrituals, rules, habits, and ceremonies; and (3 ) it is corporeal, thereby bringing in the surplus of meaning produced by the presence of performing bodies. A performative view of emotion focuses on the dynamic process of discursive practices and the materiality of the body in various modes of representation. Performance involves the embodiment of language and emotion and the fashioning and display of the body and its affects. In this sense, language is by no means exclusively responsible for constituting emotion and subjectivity.

The shift from a descriptive to a performative understanding of emotion and subjectivity means more than simply recognizing that emotion is related to boddy sensation (how we ”feel”); it says that the very notion of subjectivity itself is inevitably intertwined with embodiment. Viewing subjectivity and emotion as performances or If assemblages” opens possibilities for challenging assumed structures and thus changing existing power relations:

Subjectificationis thus thenameonecangive totheeffectsof thecompositionand recomposition of forces, practices, and relations that strive or operate to render human being into diverse subject forms, capable of taking themselves as the subjects of their own and others practices upon them (10, 171).

In this sense, examining how the performance of emotion both constructs and subverts teacher identities becomes of particular interest. Emotional cultures in schools, for example, are methodically established in emotion discourses and performances through machinations and acts of repetition. This idea is of crucial importance to educational theorists, because it enables them to see some of the repressive aspects of teaching in a new light: What rules, rituals, performances, and habits act to govern the emotions of teachers, and to direct their emotional communication and subjectification along particular lines? By examining these, one may, in turn, make possible a historical change in teacher subjectivities.

SUBJECTMTIES IN TEACHING: IDENTITY AND EMOTION IN TEACHER SUBJECTIFICATION

In the United States and England, school teachers teach in contexts that encourage individualism, isolation, a belief in one’s own autonomy, and the invest- ment of personal resources. There exists a significant body of research related to teacher i~o la t ion .~~ Teachers learn to internalize and enact roles and norms (for example, emotional rules) assigned to them by the school culture through what are considered “appropriate” expressions and silences. Teachers’ attitudes and actions

45. For more on teacher isolation, see Nias, Primary Teachers Talking; Dan Lortie, School Teacher: A Sociological Study [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Robert McTaggart, “Bureaucratic Rationality and the Self-Educating Profession: The Problem of Teacher Privatism,” fournal of Curriculum Studies 21 11989): 345361; and Andy Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age [New York: Teachers College Press, 1994).

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are, in turn, rooted in the ways that they perceive the world and life in general.46 For example, the school organizational structure clearly shapes teachers’ perceptions of emotional propriety - but these perceptions are also shaped by what ought to be felt in predefined classroom settings. Therefore, it seems important to explore teachers’ beliefs about the complex processes through which these prescriptions about what to express and what to feel actually affect teachers’ emotional conduct and subjectification.

As I explored in an earlier essay in this journal, teacher emotion is embedded in school culture, ideology, and power relations, through which certain emotional rules are produced to constitute teachers’ emotion and subje~tivity.~’ These rules act as norms that code, rank, and regulate emotional responses in terms of conformity and deviance. Emotional rules prescribe what teachers should do to comply with certain expectations about the teacher role -for example, displaying too much affection or too much anger may be inappropriate. These rules, interacting with school rituals (presentations, meetings, teachng manuals, speeches, memos), constitute both the teacher-self and teacher emotions. Teachers must perform themselves in line with these familiar identities, or they risk being seen as eccentric, if not outrageous. They need to regulate and control not only their overt habits and morals, but their inner emotions, wishes, and anxieties.48

According to Foucault, disciplinary norms operate through a detailed structur- ing of space, time, and relations among individuals, and through procedures of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment that each individual uses in order to manage her or his own conduct. Such norms or emotional rules frequently operate through what Foucault termed “technologies of the self” - ways in which individuals experience, understand, and express their emotions ”appropriately,” so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of purity, wisdom, or perfe~t ion.~~ In the school setting, for example, teachers perform (practice) their emotions under the actual or imagined authority of some system of truth that proscribes too much or too little emotional attachment to the children. If a teacher does not want to become the subject of attention or isolation, she or he should conduct (that is, regulate) her or his everyday emotions according to these norms.

A major theme recurs in this account of teacher subjectification: The practice of subjectification is fundamentally linked to a project of identity in which emotions are inextricably bound with certain ways of exercising power and, in turn, with teachers’ relations with themselves and others. Thus, a genealogy of teacher subjectification focuses directly on the practices that locate teachers in particular emotionalregimes. It accountsfor the processes bywhichidentityandthe emotional rules act upon the conduct of teachers.

46. Lortie, School Teacher. 47. See Michalinos Zembylas, ”’Structures of Feeling’ in Curriculum and T e a c h : Theorizing the Emotional Rules,” Educational Theory 52, no. 2 (2002): 187-208.

48. Rose, Governing the Soul, 156.

49. See, for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, Volume Three.

ZEMBYLAS Interrogating “Teacher Identitv” 121

If teachers come to perceive emotional rules as repressive, this may lead them (paradoxically) to experience negative emotions because it makes them feel like failures as teachers. My ethnographic study of the emotional experiences of an elementary school teacher (Catherine) in her science teaching provides an example of this process.50 The focus of this research was to explore how social conventions, community scrutiny, and school policies and requirements regarding how science should be taught constitute Catherine’s feelings about science, teaching, and herself as a teacher. School policies, practices, and social conventions encode emotion norms that regulate what Catherine is supposed to feel. For instance, an important emotional rule at her school (that is prevalent in the workplaces of many Western societies) is to regulate your emotions, which requires controlling them as well as expressing them “appropriately, ” as the situation permits. It is not appropriate simply to display one’s emotions as one feels them at all times, nor is it desirable to maintain too tight a hold over them. Because she often has to manage and control how she feels, power is exercised through imposed self-interpretation. This emotional control and regulation can range from issues such as her choice of teaching pedagogies to her feelings of well-being, and they function to produce a particular kind of teacher-self.

Furthermore, continuous self-observation and monitoring by administrators and fellow teachers enforce the notion of a “normal” teacher-self against which all teachers measure themselves. For instance, Catherine happened to be enthusiastic about pedagogies that deviated from the norm (such as teaching science in a progressive manner instead of teaching to the test like everybody else). As a result, she was told by several of her colleagues to achieve “normality” (for example, one colleague instructed her to “[dlo whatever everyone is doing, why do you want to be so different and not teach science the way it‘s supposed to be taught?”). Her prevailing feeling was a sense of powerlessness and personal inadequacy, precisely what Sandra Bartky has defined as ~hurne.~‘ It is worthwhile to analyze this feeling more deeply and to examine some of the consequences of Catherine’s subjectification as a “different” teacher.

By repeatedly characterizing her teaching philosophy as flawed, colleagues, administrators, and school policies used shame to attune Catherine’s affective responses, or to put her in line. As Bartky says, “Shame can be characterized as a species of psychic distress occasioned by a self or a state of the self apprehended as inferior, defective, or in some way d imini~hed .”~~ Catherine’s sense of shame derived primarily from her use of progressive pedagogies that were not “approved” by her colleagues and the administration; therefore, she was identified as "different." A

~

50. Michalinos Zembylas, “Constructing Genealogies of Teachers’ Emotions in Science Teaching,” Iournal of Research in Science Teaching 39 (2002): 79-103; Michalinos Zembylas, “A Paralogical Affirmation of Emotion‘s Discourse in Science Teaching,” in Teaching Science in Diverse Settings: Marginalized Discourses andClassroom Practice, eds. AngelaBartonandMargeryOsborne(NewYork: Peter Lang, 2001 J,

51. Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination (New York Routledge, 1990). 52. Ibid., 85.

99-128.

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more implicit, unstated issue underlying this “difference” was that Catherine was a deviant who should have been better managed through measures that prescribed appropriate teaching (such as memos, discussions in the staff room, and speeches about the importance of state testing). That such strategies influenced Catherine’s teaching practices is not controversial, but it is important to recognize how this discourse, which was aimed not only at disciplining Catherine’s pedagogy but also her emotions (for instance, her sense of excitement about experimenting with pedagogies), masked its disciplining function by employing abstract teacher classifications such as what it means to be a “professional teacher.’’

By constructing teacher identity as something “personal” rather than something constituted in assemblages of practices, norms, habits, and so forth, this emotion discourse relied on emotional rules and norms to define, or classify, Catherine’s status. Such classifications delimit the production of professional teacher-subjects through the knowledge produced, while they simultaneously provide Catherine and her colleagues with a language to use in talking about pedagogy and performing emotions “appropriately.” Emotion management, then, is legitimated through social networks of “professional” knowledge that reinforce the “rational” process of emotion management. Setting up meetings to discuss the importance of state testing or to interpret the test results from the previous year further supported this rational management of emotions (for example, excitement that state testing standards had been exceeded would be “acceptable”). Emotion management becomes a technique of power that depends on an emotion discourse of such ‘/normal” and “standard” responses. Emotion management becomes a kind of truth, a performative truth.

Shame like Catherine’s can be a devastating experience characterized by a negative evaluation of one’s self and by a sense of worthlessness, vulnerability, and powerlessness:

when our feelings are trivialized, ignored, systematically criticized, or extremely constrained by the poverty of our expressive resources, this situation can lead to a very serious kind of dismissal - the dmnissal of the significance to a person of his or her own life, in a way that reaches down deeply into what the significance of a life can be to the person whose life it is.%

By contrast, self-esteem, in John Rawls’ view, is rooted in the beliefs that one’s ideas are worthy and that one has the abilities and the talents to pursue such ideas.54 Catherine’s shame resulted from the belief that she lacked these abilities and that her aims were not worthy. The normative expectation implicit in these emotional rules was that Catherine should assimilate into predetermined roles and expectations and manage her “deviant” or “outlaw” emotions. Her sense of shame caused her to remain silent, to feel isolated, and perhaps, most important, to view herself as a “failure.” She became unsure of her teaching philosophy: Was she doing the “right” thing to teach science by using inquiry, emphasizing passion and love for the subject,

53. Sue Campbell, Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19971,188. See also June PriceTangney, ”Moral Affect: The Good, the Bad, andthe Ugly,” Iournal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1991): 598-607. 54. John Rawls, A Theory of\ustice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

ZEMEIYLAS Interrogating ”Teacher Identity” 123

and making connections to other subjects, when her fellow teachers accused her of depriving her students of the opportunity to get good scores on the state test?55

While Catherine’s shame was in part a discursive construct, it important to see how shame attributions [that is, the ways in which this embodied emotion shows or produces its cultural signification) are also perfonnative. Thus, ”shame” became a particular relationship affecting and being affected by Catherine‘s visions, recollec- tions, desires, affections, sadness, and the like. These were not properties but assembled “machinations” of energies, dreads, words, dreams, and habits that constituted Catherine’s subjectivity as a “shameful” person.

This perspective on Catherine’s feelings of failure and shame politicizes issues of teacher subjectification and the normalization of teacher emotions. A decade ago, Bartky called for “a political phenomenology of the emotions - an examination of the role of emotion, most particularly of the emotions of self-assessment both in the constitution of subjectivity and in the perpetuation of ~ubjection.”~~ Instead of a “phenomenology, ” I am calling for a politically meaningful “genealogy” of emotions in teaching. However, Bartky’s call and my own are united by the recognition that the political roots of emotions in education are generally ignored. In their everyday teaching practices, teachers take profound personal and professional risks, and they need to adopt resistance and support strategies in order to care for themselves and explore new forms of subjectivity.

CONSTITUTING NEW TEACHER SUBJECTMTTES The emotional rules developed in schools and legitimated through the exercise

of power are used to “govern” teachers by putting limits on their emotional expressions in order to “normalize” them and thus turn appropriate behavior into a set of skills, desirable outcomes, and dispositions that can be used to examine and evaluate them. It is not surprising, therefore, when teachers find themselves resisting the forms of selfhood they are enjoined to adopt. They use their capacity to feel good or bad as a means to draw and extend boundaries around themselves, thus forming particular resistances. Ways of relating to themselves as subjects with unique capacities worthy of respect clash with institutional demands that they be docile and disciplined, The demand to suffer one’s bad feelings in silence and find a way of stoically “going on” is deemed problematic from the perspective of a more passionate pedagogy that encourages a teacher to express her or his emotions using a particular vocabulary and performance.

Teachers are often represented and acted upon as if they were selves of a particular type: suffused with a recognized, coherent, and enduring subjectivity, grounded in a unified psychological identity. But the teacher-self, as produced in the performance of it, is constantly contested and fractured by the intersection of

55. An additional problem with this discourse is that it implies that teaching to the test and teaching using progressive pedagogies are contradictory practices (that is, the use of one approach necessarily excludes the use of the other).

56. Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 98,


activities, judgments, emotions, and desires. These intersections or assemblages operate through different technologies (such as emotional rules) that shape a teacher’s identification as normal or pathological. Given that there are many territories of exclusion and inclusion based on these technologies, it is important to recognize the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and contingency that are often masked by attributions of a unified or standard “teacher identity,’’ as in certain disciplining conceptions of “professionalism.” Yet, if anything, the belief that teachers have a “teacher identity’’ because of their profession highlights the fact that teachers are produced as particular kinds of professionals. The challenge is to show how these identities (and the emotion discourses and performances that constitute them) are produced by, and in turn produce, teachers, and to do so in ways that subvert the normalizing assumptions that underlie the notion of a common “teacher identity.’’ The notion that there is an authentic and true self to which every teacher should aspire depends upon systems of emotion management and regulation.

But can the conceptual tools developed by Foucault, Butler, and Rose provide strategies for recognizing and resisting the often oppressive technologies of emotional rules? Here I will describe two possible “strategies of resistance” that I promote in my preservice and in-service philosophy of education courses and refer to a few examples of how these strategies may Yet, to be perfectly honest, given the highly theoretical nature of the approach sketched here and the general disdain among teachers for academic theory, it is not clear whether teachers will practice these strategies or if these strategies will be effective if they do. All I can do here is to open up a possibility.

First, viewing teacher emotion and subjectivity from a Foucauldian perspective opens up the possibility for teachers to become aware of the technologies of power that govern their emotions at the personal or institutional level. If teachers are to care for themselves effectively, they must begin by identlfylng how they develop an “emotional” knowledge about their pedagogies and themselves. The challenge of developing critical emotional literacy in the context of one’s teaching is to explore how emotion discourses and performances (of frustration, disappointment, and powerlessness, for example) are constructed and how those then constitute one’s subjectivity in teaching. In my teaching, I invite teachers to leave the familiar stories of learned habits, beliefs, and thoughts so that they can begin to analyze how selective vision and emotional attention constitute particular subjectivities. For example, I ask teachers to critically analyze how they come to be regarded, and to regard themselves, as “classroom managers,” and what emotion discourses and performances are constructed around that notion.58

Resistance (understood in terms of “local” resistances and struggles) is possible only i f power is seen not as necessarily repressive but as something that can have

57. It is too early in these efforts to provide reliable information about outcomes. That may be the topic of a future paper.

58. For an excellent analysis of this issue, see Hannah Tavares, ”Classroom Management and Subjectivity: A Genealogy of Educational Identities,” Educational Theory 46, no. 2 (1996): 189-202.


positive effects, such as attaining feelings of happiness, pleasure, and wisdom. Thus, power needs to be perceived not as a negation of individuals’ capacity to act but as an element in the constitution of one’s subjectivity - that is to say, power works through and not against s~bjectivity.~~ Power is about the struggles and the resistances that are possible within existing power relations. It follows that an emotion discourse and performance at school “can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.”60 It is the absence of struggle that creates stable mechanisms which govern, what “ties the individual to himself and submits him to others.”61 Resistance, in a Foucauldian sense, is the struggle to free oneself from subjection. Yet creating resistances andproblematizing school emotional rules often exacts a significant emotional cost, because teachers may becomevulnerable in their efforts to identify, describe, and analyze cherished beliefs and habits.

Second, a Foucauldian perspective on teacher emotion and subjectivity provides teachers with a way of thinking that can help them to overcome the emotional rules that make them objects, to negotiate new positions and new emotional rules in their professional lives. This perspective encourages teachers to think and “author” themselves differently, to ask not only how emotion discourses and performances have cut them off from their desires but also how these have installed alternative desires and habits that they take on as part of themselves. In pursuing these ends we need to challenge the widespread notion that self-disclosure constitutes a knowing of one’s self. No amount of intellectual self-reflection is enough to initiate such dramatic transformations; rather, self-formation is constituted through the power relations and the resistances that the self reshapes through performances that create greater freedom.

While the teachers with whom I work often realize how deeply embedded they are in these norms and rules, they find it difficult to ”escape” from them. The formation of new teacher subjectivities is constrained by a number of barriers. Isolation and marginalization often restrict teachers‘ opportunities in their search for identity. These barriers to the formation of new subjectivities are experienced as value conflicts with the school culture’s norms. Under these circumstances teachers may tend to “foreclose” on their identities - that is, they do not question accepted beliefs and ways of acting but simply follow them in order to avoid marginalization. This barrier makes teachers socially and emotionally vulnerable. Even if they accept the importance of exploring new teacher subjectivities in theory, they may avoid such exploration if they are rewarded only for their identification with the community norms.

Perhaps the most challenging barrier to forming new teacher subjectivities, however, is the tendency for change efforts to remain entrenched in “identity”

59. Michel Foucault, ”The Subject and Power: Afterword,” in Michel Foucault, eds. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 208-227.

60. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “Power and Truth,” in Michel Foucault, eds. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 201.

61. Foucault, “The Subject and Power: Afterword,” 212.

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politics. By understanding the various discursive practices that operate within school cultures as well as the subject-making processes that help to produce teacher subjectivities within particular settings, we can begin to consider other barriers to, and possibilities for, exercising resistance. Rejecting “identity” politics does not require ignoring the ways in which identities attach to teachers (regardless of how teachers might see themselves); instead, my goal is to identify strategies for a radical remaking of subjectivity formed in and against the historical hegemony that attributes to teachers a certain, predefined identity. Such a remaking has the potential to open up the meanings attached to teacher subjectivities and render them contingent and mobile (without losing sight of the ways in which identity categories continue to shape and organize teacher experiences).62

An approach that recognizes that discourses and performances are not absolutely determining can begin to provide teachers with spaces for reconstituting themselves and their relations with others. The possibilities for action include creating new emotional rules that nurture and advance new pedagogies - that is, reformulating emotion discourse and practice. Foucault’s ideas help us locate strategies that can potentially help teachers avoid normalization. For example, after many years of unsuccessful struggle and resistance, Catherine interrupted the emotion discourse and performance of shame and frustration by capitalizing on students’ excitement with her progressive approach. Performing this new discourse of excitement provided Catherine with strategies for questioning the “teaching to the test” approach and resisting the characterizations imposed on her (that she was a failure).

In practice, then, there are a number of ways in which teachers can use the previously described strategies to construct new discourses. For example, some educators suggest autobiographical reflection and storytelling as methods for helping teachers view their teaching from alternative perspectives.@ This does not imply, of course, that the product of these reflections constitutes self-knowledge. The real advantage of these methods is that they demonstrate how these stories can help teachers construct new discourses and enact new performances, as well as how these new discourses and performances can become political forces for changing the ways in which teachers interpret educational matters and for helping them constitute new forms of teacher subjectivity.

A major implication of exploring these ideas in relation to teaching is that they allow us to overcome the fundamentalism that characterizes teacher identity categories. William Connolly contends that identities clash because, when based on foundational claims to stability, they cannot accommodate each other’s existence. However, when emotion and subjectivity are understood as anti-foundational (as in this essay), as historical events that are continuously performed, the constitution of

62. See Natasha Levinson, ”Unsettling Identities: Conceptualizing Contingency” in Philosophy of Education 1997, ed. Laird, 61-70.

63. See, for example, Geert Kelchtermans, “Teacher Vulnerability: Understandmg its Moral and Political Roots,” Cambridge Journal of Education 26 (1996): 307324; and Nel Noddings, “Stories and Affect in Teacher Education,” Cambridge 1ournal of Education 26 (1996): 435-447.

ZEMsYLAs Interrogating “Teacher Identity” 127

multiple and contingent identities is opened up. Thus, it does not make sense to define some identities as “other” or “different.” Connolly argues that this pluralization would lead to greater tolerance and understanding for the abundant possibilities available to individuals or

TOWARD A CONCLUSION

The purpose of this essay has been to explore how some poststructural ideas can help us theorize emotion and subjectivity in teaching and examine teachers’ opportunities for self-formation and strategies of power and resistance, I suggested that, by using such ideas to interrogate emotional rules a t the level of constituting the teacher-self, teachers can become aware of the diverse ways in which they perform their emotions, beliefs, energies, and the like, and in so doing begin to transform normalizing techniques of (emotional) self-formation. Two specific strategies were described: ( 1 ) becoming aware of the technologies that govern one’s emotions and subjectivities and (21 creating strategies of resistance and self-formation through reformulating emotion discourses and performances. A genealogy of emotions in teaching identifies the multiple possibilities for performing new teacher subjectivities and reminds us that a prudent approach ought not prevent us from exploring the potential of interrupting the taken-for-granted machinations of emotions, beliefs, rules.

The approach described here exposes issues of profound political significance for teacher emotion and teacher subjectivity. I have suggested that the constant deconstruction and subversion of emotional rules coded in various “grounds” (for example, morality, utility, efficiency, professionalism) is one way to resist exclu- sionary power. Given the barriers and challenges impelng the formation of new teacher subjectivities, one might argue that there is little prospect for change. Still, teachers might at least use these strategies to contest the forms of subjectivities and the emotional regimes that have been invented for them. In contesting their subjectivities, teachers are engaged in an exercise of responsibility and resistance. This may not guarantee any kind of “freedom,” but it begins to offer strategies for the care of the teacher-self.

64. William Connolly, IdentitylDifference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Come11 University Press, 1991). Connolly writes, ”To acknowledge a variety of contingent elements in the formation of identity is to take a significant step toward increasing tolerance for the range of antinomies in oneself, countering the demand to treat close internal unity as the model toward which all selves naturally tend,” 178.

interrogating \"teacher identity\": emotion, resistance, and self-formation

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