Research: Affective Reader Response: Using Ordinary Affects to Repair Literacy Normativities in ELA and English Education

Abstract

Literacy normativities reinforce the colonial, racist, and anti-queer underpinnings of English education, and today these normativities are propelled by the English teacher imagination. To render these normativities visible, this study traces the affective reader responses of an inquiry community of queer educators and reveals normative reading practices that animate how English teachers imagine and feel their classroom worlds. In particular, ordinary affects—those that are subtly felt and often overlooked—spotlight interpretive norms and normative feelings that hide the field’s ongoing commitments to colonization, racism, queerphobia, and more. Contributing to Critical English Education (CEE), this article concludes by calling for multiple prisms of interpretation to dismantle literacy normativities in English education and ELA.