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Power and Education

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(In defense of) pedagogies ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1757743819850853
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Jennifer R Wolgemuth
College of Education, University of South Florida, USA

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, USA

Timothy Barko
College of Education, University of Florida, USA

Abstract
Despite best efforts to the contrary, obscenity oozes out from under the rugs of “polite” school-
ing and “tidy” society. In this post-qualitative inquiry, the authors pursue questions in defense of
pedagogies of obscenity. In what ways do educators fail to educate when they eschew obscenity,
understand shame and disgust as opposite to curiosity, and seek to teach in safe and sanitized
classrooms? How might obscenity be educative? Drawing on their classroom experiences, the

zek and Gallop in an analysis of (potentially) offensive classroom practices and
authors engage Zi

events. They conclude that (Zi

zek and Gallop’s) obscenity might enable scholars and educators
to generate critical classroom spaces that travel a delicate line between offense, discomfort, and
learning. The authors suggest that there is much to defend in a pedagogy of obscenity, and that
the value of obscenity may be learning to live and work more critically with(in) and against the
perversions of education.

Keywords
Teaching, critical theory, obscenity, ethics, post-qualitative

Corresponding author:
Jennifer R Wolgemuth, Educational and Psychological Studies, College of Education, University of South Florida, 4202 East
Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
Email: jrwolgemuth@usf.edu
2 Power and Education 0(0)

Obscenity is not new to philosophy, human folklore, or the classroom (Holt, 2008). Some
human cave paintings and art artifacts are of sex organs and sexual acts, and the earliest
of these may be nearly 40,000 years old (White et al., 2012). The oldest remaining record
of “dirty jokes,” Philogelos, is a book that dates back to the 4th or 5th century AD and
includes jokes we might find funny and/or obscene today: “‘I had your wife for nothing,’
someone sneered at a wag. ‘More fool you. I’m her husband, I have to have the ugly
bitch. You don’t’” (quoted in Holt, 2008: 13). While we cannot speak decidedly for what
ancient civilizations found obscene, there is no doubt that contemporary teachers, texts,
and educational institutions deem some artifacts, images, ideas, forms of humor, and
topics more or less appropriate for sharing in classrooms (see, for example,
Ravitch, 2003).
Despite best efforts to the contrary, obscenity oozes out from under the rugs of “polite”
schooling and “tidy” society. Obscenity (also in classroom contexts) has been with us for a
long time, yet contemporary forms of obscenity might look quite different from the above
cave paintings and joke books. In addition, contemporary safe spaces have changed. We,
educators, have many experiences where even the most “safe” and antiseptic lesson plans
led classes into moments of obscenity, offense, and discomfort. From a theoretical stand-
point, Alcorn (2012), drawing on psychoanalytic theories of affect (for example, Sedgwick,
1995, 2003; Tomkins, 1962, 1963), argues that offensive moments in the classroom can
provoke deep-seated biological responses of shame and disgust, which directly inhibit
learning—that is, when taking in an offensive thought or belief, an involuntary shame/
disgust response to “vomit out” prevents meaningful engagement with potentially produc-
tive ideas.
In this post-qualitative philosophical engagement with and reading of data (see, for
example, Lather, 2013; Lather and St Pierre, 2013; Van Cleave, 2017), we engage and

zek (for example, 2000, 2008) and Gallop (1988) to work through pedagogies
interrogate Zi

of obscenity in general and our experiences with obscenity in the classroom in particular.
This article is not a philosophical treatise on obscenity but an exploration into what obscen-
ity did/does or might do in educational contexts. In this way, we put the concept of obscen-
ity to “work” (see also Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) in/on our classroom experiences,
pedagogical practices, and reflections. A variety of obscenities—the kinds that ooze up in
classrooms—are available for this type of reflective analysis. We focus on two broad forms
of obscenity in two parts following our introduction—Part 1: profanity, sex, and obscenities
of the body (Gallop) and Part 2: bigotry, sexism, and “politically correct” political and

zek)—as starting points for our inquiry.
discursive obscenities (Zi

The aim of our inquiry is to pursue questions about obscenity and learning in order to
explore what might be said (if anything) in defense of pedagogies of obscenity. Reflecting on
our experiences with obscenity in the classroom, we consider ways we might fail to educate
when creating a clean, safe space for learning means eschewing obscenity, and when we
understand shame and disgust as opposite to curiosity and learning (see also Koro-
Ljungberg et al., 2015). Following Strohminger (2014: 485), who discusses academia’s cur-
rent fascination with “disgust,” we wonder about the excitatory nature of the obscene:
“Does sexual arousal make us insensate to the stimuli that usually give rise to disgust, or
do disgusting stimuli flip to become sexually exciting? Do flashes of disgust themselves
become appealing when above a certain threshold of arousal?”
Wolgemuth et al. 3

Monstrosity (of obscenity) in the classroom

Drawing on Zi

zek, we understand obscenity as part of a pre-ontological monstrousness.
Beneath the surface of culture and society rests a pre-ontological domain that is monstrous
yet necessary, productive yet obscene (see, for example, Kre
ci
c and Zi

zek, 2016). However,
obscenity is often forbidden, hidden, and seemingly absent (yet present) in many classrooms
(Sobre-Denton and Simonis, 2011) and, as such, obscenity blurs boundaries between for-
bidden or monstrous spaces and safe spaces.

zek and Kearney (2003) can help scholars and educators rethink monstrosity and its
Zi

purposes or functions. Strangers, Gods, and monsters are all names for the experience of
alterity and otherness within and amongst us (Kearney, 2003). Monstrosity is likely to bring
forward experiences of novelty, strangeness, and namelessness, and, as such, monstrosity
cannot be completely recognized or be recognizable. “Sublime is that mark of the unfore-
seeable and incommensurable which flouts our rules of reason, and ultimately reduces us to
silence” (Kearney, 2003: 92) or to a pause or hesitation. Monstrosity may also attract the
foreign and the otherness in teachers and students, becoming their “Others par excellence”
(Kearney, 2003: 117), surrogates and substitutes for forbidden life. Monsters might also
function as potential surrogates of the self (see also Baade and Hightower, 2011). To Zi

zek,
this monstrous reality rests at the core of us as a species. The monstrous in pedagogy would
include obscenities that pass beyond acceptable and normative limits of educational prac-
tices and discourses. The monstrous violates expressible and pleasant subjectivities by trou-
bling and questioning positions of the moral teacher, ethical educational content, the good

zek (2016) note that “the sublime
student, or acceptable classroom interaction. Kre
ci
c and Zi

pleasure is a pleasure in unpleasure, while the monstrous generates only unpleasure, but, as
such, it provides enjoyment” (63). This lust/pleasure distances the subject from purposive-
ness and provokes disgust. “Disgust arises when the border that separates the inside of our
body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out, as in the case of blood or

zek draw from Kristeva and her notion of “abject,”
shit” (64). Furthermore, Kre
ci
c and Zi

stating: “what we experience in such situations is not just a disgusting object but something
much more radical: the disintegration of the very ontological coordinates that enable me to
locate an object into external reality out there” (69). The distinction between the object and
subject, myself and others, becomes blurred and unclear, simultaneously producing fear.

zek (2016) individuals deal with “abject” in different ways—
According to Kre
ci
c and Zi

from ignorance and avoidance to disgust, fear, and constraining it to private and secluded
(safe) places (toilets, hospitals, bedrooms). For example, in parts of India, Hindus defecate
in public without anyone commenting on or documenting their squatting bodies and the

zek (2016) explain that, in the example of Hindus, “it
feces they leave behind. Kre
ci
c and Zi

is blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation” (72).
This foreclosure appears as a hyphen or virgule, “allowing the two universes of filth and of
prohibition to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as
object and as law” (72). We wonder what happens when filth and prohibition rub against
each other in educational spaces, and what it takes for obscenity to “produce” in the class-
room. What forms of knowing, what critiques, might be enabled if we summon the obscen-
ities of the monstrous to work against our given and normative social orders? What
productive disruptions might this allow in the classroom? What if we welcome rather
than spend so much time gentrifying the monstrous, and hiding (from) the spaces that
4 Power and Education 0(0)

emerge in our teaching when offense and obscenity ooze out from under the rugs, rocks,
and closets?

Pedagogy as pederasty or contamination

Welcoming the monstrous could offer opportunities for teachers and learners to break down
normative pedagogies as “clean” or “pure” (safe) educational encounters. Gallop (1988)
addresses obscenity as defiling innocence and dispelling ignorance through a Sadean frame-
work of pedagogy. According to Gallop: “the fact that the teacher and student are tradi-
tionally of the same sex but of different ages contributes to the interpretation that the
student has no otherness, nothing different from the teacher, simply less” (43). As is typical

zek, such metaphors bring philosophy and pedagogy into the bedroom,
of De Sade and Zi

subsuming the psychosexual into a game of philosophy and learning:

One of Sade’s contributions to pedagogical technique may be the institution, alongside the
traditional oral examination, of an anal examination . . . pederasty is undoubtedly a useful
paradigm for classic European pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowl-
edge. The student is empty, a receptacle for the phallus; the teacher is the phallic fullness of
knowledge. (43)

If we are to think with Gallop, in what ways are the obscene turns we might make in the
classroom a byproduct of pedagogy as pederasty? What happens when we think of teaching
and learning in terms of defilement and contamination? Do we imagine a pedagogical
attempt to infect a tabula-rasa toxic to the old, easy order? Might we be like Socrates, a
contaminator of youth?
What follows from Gallop and learning-as-defilement is a loss of cleanness and innocence
in exchange for knowledge-as-pathogen—knowledge that infects bodies through various
invasive modes of transmission. For example: “I invade your body with obscenity and
you grant me your attention. I shock you into opening up, putting down your laptop,
and turning off your cellphone.” The student has just taken in something “real” and they
take notice. Yet what happens when we work to undermine the teacher’s mastery over
knowledge and subsequently to unmaster desire, to realize that “good teaching” is not
always “clean teaching” and that to truly be discursive we must also engage in the mon-
strous? Does obscenity disrupt this desire or is the position of “good teacher” required in
order to be obscene? How do we begin to open up ourselves and our classrooms to obscen-
ity? And why should we?

We are exactly that kind of bad

As Vonnegut opened Slaughterhouse-Five, this all happened more or less. It definitely
started at a conference and certainly at night—later than it should have been, as conferences
all start pretty early. We were all slightly inebriated—some more than others—among
friends and in our comfort zones. As the night progressed, our talk became less and less
academic and more and more casual. We got to talking about classroom experiences and
obscenity. It was liberating to learn that one of us once said “fuck” in the classroom and no
one seemed to mind. We laughed when one of us recounted a story of farting loudly in the
middle of a lecture. We commiserated on times when our students did and said things we
Wolgemuth et al. 5

found offensive, marginalizing, and/or hateful, and expressed our desires to silence those
students. That night blossomed into our year-long collaboration on obscenity in the class-
room, in which we wrote about, exchanged, and discussed obscene classroom moments. In
our conversations, we connected those moments to political and pedagogical discussions
and events (academic freedom, pussy-grabbing presidents, debates about free speech versus
safe spaces, trigger warnings, spikes in hate crimes across the USA, etc.), and theoretical
readings. Throughout, we asked: If obscenity happens, how might we defend its presence in
the classroom?
We pursue this question by engaging and interrogating Zi

zek (for example, 2000, 2008)
and Gallop (1988) in a two-part analysis of potentially offensive examples of our classroom
practices and events. In Part 1, we focus on bodily obscenities. We draw on Zi

zek’s (2008)
provocative account of torture in In Defense of Lost Causes to interrogate a classroom
teacher we position as responsible for an obscene classroom moment—an intrusive men-
struating body—and ask her to defend herself against our (obscene) interrogations. We use

zek, and Massumi to help us with our interrogations, asking what right she had to
Gallop, Zi

be obscene and to shock. We explore the ways in which shock connects us and our students
to the pre-ontological monstrous, and the possibilities that connection may open
and foreclose.
In Part 2, we focus on “politically correct” political and discursive obscenities in a nar-
rative monologue written by a fictional college teacher. Through this monologue, we explore
and push up against the boundaries of obscene and safe spaces, and venture into the possible
limits of our defense of pedagogies of obscenity. We pursue the limits of opening up our
classrooms to the monstrous, including teachers’ power(lessness) to do so, what happens
when filth and prohibition rub up against each other, and the limits of the kinds of peder-
asteries we might wish to pursue, promote, and/or defend. We conclude that Zi

zek’s and
Gallop’s vulgarity might move scholars away from purified and sanitized discourses and
practices, enabling educators to consider and generate critical classroom spaces that travel a
delicate line between offense, discomfort, safety, and learning.
The events in Parts 1 and 2 are those we shared and discussed during our year-long
collaborative post-qualitative inquiry into disgust. The events are from the school/educa-
tional lives of the authors but, at the same time, these events could be “fictional,” since
fictional events carry the same potential of becoming, happening, and affecting as “real,”
remembered, or documented events. The “empirical” possibility of monstrous, obscene, and
potentially disturbing bodily events, including interrogations (Part 1) and the use of safe
words (Part 2), happening in the classroom exists in every educational space where bodies
and body particles interact, and filth and prohibition make contact.

Part 1. Interrogating pedagogical body particles

In Part 1, we (“not-so-innocent witnesses”) draw from pride-and-ego-down interrogation
techniques that are used to attack and insult the egos of detainees. Pride-and-ego-down
interrogation enables us to bring forward voices and perspectives of possible disgust that
might not become accessible in order to interrogate the various perspectives of our obscene
classroom intruder—the menstruating body.
Interrogation techniques have been used by the military, law enforcement, and counter-
terrorism for a long time to elicit objective and difficult information from detainees, prison-
ers, and sources of various kinds (see Kelly et al., 2013; MacCauley, 2007).
6 Power and Education 0(0)

More specifically, the US Army’s “Field manual” (Department of the Army, 1992) charac-
terizes the pride-and-ego-down approach as attacking the detainee’s personal worth and
pride—their loyalty, intelligence, appearance, and abilities. The purpose is to force the
detainee to defend their abilities and, by doing so, they will reveal sensitive information.
Similarly, in this article, we use interrogation techniques against ourselves, our thinking, and
educational experiences to “self-question” the worth of our knowledge and memories.
The interrogation questions are ours, our peer students’, the comments of our teachers
and educators, and memories and notes of educational discourses shaping schooling expe-
riences locally and internationally.
The menstruating body and the female teacher producing menstrual blood and flows
commit a crime against the civilized institution of education and against a neutral, pure, and
clean teacher body. Pride-and-ego-down interrogation techniques assault the ego of the
menstruating body—not a single menstruating body, but a menstruating body actualized
differently in different contexts and continuously shifting through intervals of movement.
“It is across intervals of intensive movements that the body becomes something else”
(Massumi, 2002: 107).
The menstruating female teacher body is also a medicalized and examined (as reproduc-
tive, fertile, and physiologically average) body. Gallop (1988) draws parallels between edu-
cational and medical examination. For example, students’ virginity is a sign of purity and
educational possibility, as well as an indication of sexual beginning (absence). Through
examination, authorities can combine bleeding with the penetration of hymen. However,
the flow of menstrual blood is more complicated. “Menstrual blood does not wait for a
leader or driver to exact it; so it renders the examination inexact”:

The pedagogical examination which attempts to regulate the student on the basis of external
rules, of the teacher’s rules, is messed up by the re´gles, the rules, flowing from within. The bodily,
fluid, material, feminine sense of re´gles undermines the Sadian pederastic pedagogue’s attempt
at exact examination, at subjugation of the pupil to his rational, masterful rules. (Gallop,
1988: 52)

Menstruation may threaten the order and examination of educational institutions, especially
when considering the number of females in educational contexts and occupations, and the
US president describing a female journalist, who asked him about his offensive statements
about women, as having “blood coming out of her wherever” (Rucker, 2015). Gallop asks:
How could the blood on the tampon be raised to the level of theory? Perhaps educational
and behavioral exactness is messed up by (irregular) menstruation. According to Gallop,
menstrual blood embarrasses both the mother and the whole in various and often unex-
pected ways. The menstruating body (in the classroom) takes many forms, and its affects are
sometimes sensed and sometimes only anticipated.

Menstruating Body 1

Bright, fresh green pants. Teacher’s pant color resembles fashion from local department store in
a rural town. Bright-green color is also a color of living, a color of biology. Bright green
blending with red. Spread legs across the table. Menstrual period has started today without
any prior signs. No stomach ache or cramping. Just blood. Blood gushing through green pants
Wolgemuth et al. 7

creating bloody stains on the teacher’s desk. Does somebody notice? Nobody notices. Continue
and carry on. Pretend and forget. For now.

Interrogation questions:

Did you not notice that your teacher body was read by students as a menstruating body?
Did you think you were an attractive woman for some teenagers in your class?
Did you enjoy displaying your menstrual blood?
Did you enjoy foregrounding your sexuality, even though you knew about the expected and
anticipated neutrality of teacher bodies?
Did you enjoy the spread of blood across your crotch?
Did you experience pleasure?

The bleeding through the pants and leakage of menstrual blood event produced connections
and disconnection, senses of belonging and not belonging, separation and unity, shame and
pride, curiosity and ignorance, and discourses of normality and abnormality. Sexuality–
woman–body was in flux. Massumi (2002) refers to the technology of the event “that is also
a technology of the self and a technologizing of the self” (55):

In its spatial aspect, the body without an image is the involution of subject–object relations into
the body of the observer and of that body into itself. Call the spatiality proper to the body
without an image quasi corporeality. (57)

In some ways, the menstruating teacher’s body becomes a collision of overlapping perspec-
tives that cannot be separated. Teacher, green pants, teenage students, blood, desk, and
stain all become transformed into one, a singular embodiment of the teacher’s body that is
still not separate from other bodies and the green pants. Female students’ teenage bodies
anticipate their own vaginal flows, including menstruation blood, leukorrhea, and semen,
among others.

Menstruating Body 2

“Irmeli cannot dress like a student because she is a teacher,” students whispered. She was a well-
liked, student-centered, and beloved middle school biology teacher. She inspired her students
and taught them with passion. She had great communication skills that she also used to flirt with
male teachers, especially a handsome male chemistry teacher she shared an office with. Irmeli
always began her morning lesson by a lecture while sitting on the teacher’s desk with her legs
spread. One fall day, it did not take long before Irmeli’s green pants were noticed by all the
teenage students in the class. She had one large red-brown stain in the crotch. Her menstrual
pads had leaked and blood stained the desk. Maybe she did not have a pad. The location and
color of the stain clearly signified menstrual blood. The desk became a stage for display
and revelation of womanhood. Irmeli did not seem to notice that the students stared at her
pants and the bloody desk. Irmeli sat on the desk, talked, taught, laughed, and finished her
lesson. Later, Irmeli wore the same pants again with a stain less visible but always present to the
students. Irmeli had become a spectacle and her pants continued signifying womanhood and
menstrual cycle again and again. Irmeli’s body and bodily fluids continued to present themselves
in different forms for different student bodies. Her body put forward a transformative motion
8 Power and Education 0(0)

between one bodily state (non-sexual teacher body) and a radically different one (bleeding and
menstruating woman).

zek (2003), drawing from Diderot’s work, refers to the “talking vagina”—the vagina as an
Zi

instrument capable of emitting sounds. Diderot sees the vagina as a subjectless partial
object. It is the “truth itself that speaks when the vagina starts to talk . . . what speaks

zek, 2003: 115). Can the vagina talk
through the vagina is drive, this subjectless moi” (Zi

blood? Is menstrual blood the by-product of the truth talking vagina that transmits it? Or
does menstrual blood just happen in its different variations? It is possible that the newness
of the menstrual blood cannot be reduced to its causes or conditions, to truth or falsness,
but blood produces the different, unanticipated, and foreign, or everything possible
in between.

Interrogation questions:

Why would you wear the bright-green jeans again if you knew you had a stain on them?
Why would you let your blood stain the table if you felt wetness in your pants and you noticed
your pad leaking?
Why would you sit on the table if a chair was available?
Did you think about crossing your legs and covering the blood stains?
Did you cramp?
Menstruating Body 3

During women’s menstrual cycle, the lining of the uterus thickens to get ready for pregnancy.
During the period, the body sheds the uterus lining along with blood. The amount of blood and
fluid lost is usually between four and twelve teaspoons each cycle. A normal period lasts between
two and seven days. The amount and color of blood can vary. Bright-red blood indicates that it
has been produced by the body recently. Women may see brighter-red blood if they have a
lighter flow or frequent periods. Dark blood is essentially older blood. This means it has been
stored in the uterus longer and had more time to break down. Many women notice darker-red
blood when they first wake in the morning. Sometimes, when bright-red blood mixes with
cervical fluid it can appear an almost orange color with red flecks.

Heavy bleeding is one of the most common problems women report to their doctors. Many
women become accustomed to heavy periods, considering them to be normal. Over time,
though, the excess monthly blood loss can lead to anemia, potentially causing weakness or
fatigue. Generally speaking, one out of every five women has heavy periods. However, many
women do not know that they can get treated for it. Others do not seek out help because they are
too embarrassed to talk with a doctor about their problem.

Interrogation questions:

Have you ever heard that pads and tampons leak quite frequently?
Why did you not consider extra protection and frequent change of pads?
Have you ever talked to your doctor about the heavy days?
Are you periods extra heavy?
Did you consider another brand of pads or tampons?
Wolgemuth et al. 9

Did you consider using another pair of pants?

Did you not notice how the students compared your body to the human body you were teaching
to them as part of the biology lesson and reproductive biology classes?
Would seeing a menstruating teacher make you feel sick and maybe vomit?

Massumi explains that

the body is no longer a transducer but rather a resonation chamber, a resonating vessel that
compulsively, ineffectually registers the force of gravity—as what? In states of near-sensory
deprivation and, more importantly, of deprivation of expression, the mind cannot stop but
neither can it continue. (Massumi, 2002: 106)

What happens to Irmeli’s menstruating body when the resonation chamber is blocked by
a tampon?

Do you consent to be part of our research?

Meanwhile, the phone rings. The school nurse calls. “You need to pick up your child immedi-
ately,” is being stated in deterministic voice. My son has vomited—twice. Prearranged phone
call with colleagues to talk about disgust paper needs to be postponed.

Part 2. Dispatches from the ivory tower: a monologue

In this narrative monologue, we turn our focus from bodily obscenities to political and
discursive ones. We draw on empirical/fictional discursive obscene and offensive classroom
moments to pursue what discursive obscenities make available in the classroom, the kinds of
resistance(s) they might enable, and the limits of possible defenses of pedagogies of obscen-
ity. We ask what might be (our, the desired) limits to opening up our classroom spaces to the
monstrous, to welcoming moments when filth and prohibition rub up against each other.
We organize the monologue as a kind of pedagogical reflection in which a college teacher
reflects on their power in the classroom and pursues increasingly obscene thoughts, mem-
ories, experiences, and imaginations to provoke, disturb, and shock their thinking about
obscenity. The teacher reasons that this reflection is vital to their practice of a pedagogy of
obscenity in which they attempt to undermine academic hierarchies and walk a delicate line
between offense, discomfort, safety, and learning.

I attended a safe-zone training on campus today. Maybe we all need safe zones and safe words
to safeguard against monstrous spaces? As if we and they can. The safe word for today is
trigger warning.
...
Sometimes there isn’t even a safe word. It can be a gesture. When Christopher Hitchens vol-
untarily subjected himself to waterboarding, they gave him two weighted metal bars. When he
had had enough, because he was gagged with a rag stuffed in his mouth, a shirt pressed over his
face, and he couldn’t talk because they were pouring water over the shirt and into his mouth and
nose, he was supposed to drop the bars. If the interrogator didn’t see the bars fall, at least he’d
hear the long metallic clang ringing over all the choking and gagging noises. Trigger warning!
10 Power and Education 0(0)

...
What classroom gestures tell me something is a trigger, or an offense? Shuffling in seats? Eyes
cast downward? How many gestures before I foreclose or gentrify the monstrous? What does
that even mean?
...
What do we do when we cannot speak or we cannot gesture? I have this paper you can sign.
Check the boxes next to the items you are OK with. We all have hard and soft limits. A hard
limit: what must not be done, ever. Soft limit: something that can be done but only in a certain
way. We need a second language, a system of signs and symbols, to make sure we are heard,
loud and clear, over all the troublesome bits.
...
Maybe every student in my classroom should sign an informed consent.
...

zek (2009) said a joke once. I didn’t find it funny. Zi

Zi

zek talks of “short circuits” creating faulty
connections in a network; it breaks the system down and induces a shock—the shock, of course,
intended to give us a new way of seeing and to engage us in a more critical view of the reading.
The joke involves a Mongol, a farmer, the farmer’s wife, testicles, dirt, and rape. We are told
that the joke was quite common among dissidents in Russia. I suppose they found it funny, or so

zek wants to distance himself, just enough, so that the audience
we are told. Or it could be that Zi

doesn’t make too much of a deal about it. Or maybe he doesn’t care. You bought his book. You
knew what to expect. Resistance is kind of like that joke. You may feel like you are resisting but
in the end you’ll be no better than the Russian farmer and his wife. You were exploited but at
least you didn’t do exactly what you were told. The goal of resistance isn’t to soil those in power.
The goal is to castrate them and take away their power. Is obscenity a pair of scissors or is it the
dirt on the ground?
...
I sometimes say something shocking in class to get students’ attention. It usually works. I like to
think it undermines my power, which is a kind of resistance to academic hierarchies. In this case,
obscenity is both the scissors and the dirt. I castrate myself.
...
I said “fuck” in class one time. Nothing happened. The students loved it. They laughed more
than they did at my (dirty) jokes. I started cursing a little more, testing the waters, with an
occasional “bullshit” or “ass.” I tried to make it seem like it just slipped out and wasn’t inten-
tional. But it was intentional. I have the mouth of a sailor. That semester when the student
evaluations came in, most of the students wrote positive comments about my approachability
and openness, though one student wrote that I was biased, not open-minded, and didn’t behave
professionally. Does it matter that I have power over them? That they are a captive audience?
Today’s safe word is culturally responsive education.
...
I did it again the following semester. Same results. Students seemed to really like it. I am now
known as an approachable instructor.
...
Ecstavasia and Addison (1992) once entitled an essay “Fucking (with theory) for money.”
I haven’t seen a royalty check yet for anything I have written. Does that clear my conscience
or does it make me worse than Zi

zek’s farmer? At least he disobeyed. I just go through the
motions and do what the editors tell me to do.
...
Wolgemuth et al. 11

Kim (2015) talks about narrative analysis as “flirting with data.” Should I encourage
my students to move beyond flirting—to round first, second, third, and fourth bases
with their data? And how would they write that up? Would they clean it up for the journal
editors too?
...
I wonder if, instead of “fuck,” I would have received the same responses if I had said a word like
“retard” or “faggot?” Talk about self-castration.
...
Is it possible to use obscenity in a progressive way? Can words that have social consequences for
those who use them ever be constructive?
...
In his show Louie, Louis CK creates a scene where the word “faggot” is discussed. A bunch of
comedians and friends playing poker; a discussion about why the word is offensive; a mixture
of solemnity and humor. The issue of the origin of the word is explored. Homosexuals were
treated as less than witches. The stake was too good for them. Witches had dignity.
Homosexuals, they were burned with the other faggots; the kindling; the fires that are used
to start the real fires. And yet, there are still jokes to be had, supposedly. It’s all locker-room
talk, after all.
...
President Trump used the same excuse to justify his comments about grabbing women by their
“pussies”: locker-room talk.
...
Could my classroom be a locker room? Would that excuse work for me, too?
...
I don’t remember the last time I actually talked to someone in the locker room. I always try to
avoid eye contact. It isn’t exactly the place for conservations.
...
“Pussy,” short for the term “pusillanimous,” to mean cowardly, timid, lacking in courage.
Merriam-Webster tells us the word is derived from the Late Latin pusillus or “very small.”
The diminutive of pusus, or “boy.”
...
The locker-room excuse. A cowardly set-up to justify one’s words. A pusillanimous justification.
...
Obscenity is power. I have power over someone when I offend them. It doesn’t matter what they
think, only what I say. “We are always more influenced than we realize by the ideas we contest”
(De Beauvoir, 2014: 79). What happens when the class begins to realize they are prisoners, albeit
ones that pay a lot of money to be incarcerated in classrooms? Do they have to put up with
this shit?
...
Louis CK admitted to sexual misconduct. Maybe his voice is simply that, the voice of a pervert,
and there is no lesson to be learned. Maybe the lesson is to simply justify the obscenity: “Look, it
is meaningful, so I can say what I want!”
...
Obscenity. Humor. Satire. Irony. All are now (or have always been) ideological. There are
political consequences. But that won’t stop humorists. It won’t stop politicians either. What
about teachers and students?
12 Power and Education 0(0)

...
Are we merely soiling those in power or castrating them? Or is it the other way around? Are they
using obscenity to castrate and divide us? To soil us and bring us down to their level? Maybe I
should just try to keep my classroom clean and intact.
...
Badiou called Sarkozy a “rat.” They accused him of using language similar to those in power
during the Third Reich—a trick, Badiou (2008: 3) states, “invented two or three years ago and
use[d] against anyone who displeases them.” If they can call liberals “communist swine,”
“cucks,” and “snowflakes,” why can’t Badiou call conservatives “rats?”
...
“Society and the State need animal characteristics to use for classifying people” (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 239). We know that animals, much like politicians and philosophers, travel in
packs—rats and pigs, wolves and sheep, sometimes even jellyfish. Not because they sting but
because they lack a backbone and ruin your holidays at the beach.
...
But what if the term “rat” was once used by fascists and Nazis to disparage Jews and justify their
extermination? Or how the Hutu majority in Rwanda used similar pest-like metaphors in the
actions taken against the Tutsis.
...
A riot broke out in Berkeley because the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was going to
give a talk. People were hurt. Were people acting like animals?
...
What about fungal characteristics instead of animal ones? Stormy Daniels called Trump a
“toadstool” in reference to his manhood.
...
According to Zi

zek (2008), political correctness is a more dangerous form of totalitarianism.
...
Is my classroom a totalitarian regime? Is it my responsibility to soil myself and students?
...
Has the safe space become a mechanism by which the left builds an ideological ghetto? Did the
pressure to sanitize the words of the other become a means to alienate the traditionally blue-
collar base that the left assumed would continue to support them?
...
There is a joke told by comedians after hours, when everyone has gone home and all that remain
are other comedians. It usually starts something like this: a family walks into a talent agency. It
is a mother, father, two daughters, and a baby. “Sir,” the father says, “our family has a won-
derful act. If you let us perform it for you, I just know you’ll sign us.” Who would have known
that Bob Saget, the father from the beloved family sitcom Full House, had such a filthy mouth?
Seriously, just YouTube it: “Bob Saget and aristocrats.”
...

zek sitting on a toilet. Has he soiled himself?
I’ve seen a picture of Zi

...
I was once written up in elementary school for saying “Oh, hell.” Even my religious mother
thought the whole thing was a bit pedestrian.
...
I was assigned to read Troubling the Angels by Lather and Smithies (1997) in a class. I couldn’t
finish it. I got sick reading it. I actually threw up. Two years previous, I had been a retroviral
Wolgemuth et al. 13

chemo patient. Injections once a week. Six pills every day. Three in the morning. Three in the
evening. The injections made me feel like I had the flu. Chills. Muscle aches. No taste for food.
The pills made me nauseous and, after about a month, made my skin itch and burn. I had scaly
scars on my stomach and thighs from all the injections. Nearing five months, I had to inject into
the flabby sections of my triceps. I did it wrong once and the needle, as short as it was, went
completely through to the other end of my arm. I hate needles. The book brought this all back to
me. The chills. The fear of needles. The feelings of sickness that never seem to get better.
I couldn’t do the assignment. It was too much. Trigger warning! TRIGGER WARNING!
...
How could my professor have known?
...
I always tell my students the following: we live in a complex, crowded, and chaotic society.
People are all around us and often in close proximity, within our safe zones. Each of these
individuals lives in their own world with their own values and their own way of doing things.
Occasionally, you will step on their toes. And sometimes it will really hurt them. It is inevitable,
society being what it is. But remember the following: you, too, will have your toes stepped on
and, occasionally, it will really hurt. And sometimes you tread on your own feet, fall down, and
give yourself a concussion. You cannot live in this chaotic place without understanding how to
forgive. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Or maybe
we should all sign our waivers. Check the boxes next to the items you are OK with. Make sure to
specify the hard and soft limits.
...
Or is Nietzsche right? I’ve become the kind of monster I intended to fight all along?

What are we (educators and educated) left with? What comes

zek?
after Zi

Our article is not a call for or exercise in unfiltered obscenity, unlimited, seemingly inap-
propriate language, or continuous insults toward the other. In its obscenity and paradox we
hope the opposite. We put forward our thoughts and experiences to serve as notes against
the tidiness, orderliness, and docile-body discourses taking place in contemporary educa-
tional spaces; reminders of educational and moral/ethical paradoxes to be worked through;
and/or provocative invitations that enable us/we/them to enter messy, dirty, and unpleasant
spaces of educational practices and discourses. Our point here is not to insult, traumatize, or
mock, but to take up a question of difference in order to begin to reverse norms of “safe
language” or appropriate classrooms. It is possible that unpleasant discourses and practices
stimulated or brought forward through obscenity, or some other forms of unexpected affect,
can offer productive ruptures and critical places of rethinking, negotiation, and exploration
of educational and pedagogical liminality. What might students learn and gain from Irmeli’s
menstruating body? What is the pedagogical value of “fuck?”
In addition, we are concerned, following Zi

zek, about the narrowing of space for engage-
ment with contentious issues, ideas, and experiences when words, phrases, and ideas are increas-
ingly relegated as “obscene” (by both the right and the left). If educational discourses and
practices are overly cleansed, controlled, and censored, we might not have much (life) to discuss
and share. Thus, we obviously worry about creating and enforcing normative “safe spaces” in
which language, language practices, and discourses are strictly policed and become totalitarian.
14 Power and Education 0(0)

Johnson (1995: 129) describes pedagogical discourses as disinfecting dialogues character-

ized by cleanliness: “no odors, no germs: it is sanitized, deodorized, bleached” to keep
otherness and other “isms” at bay. We desire no cleansing and doubt that it is possible to
keep anything disgusting or obscene in our pedagogies at bay. Thus, we do not seek to share
(yet) another line of neutral, “nice,” and convenient concluding pedagogical wonderings or
deodorized reflections about teaching and our experiences (obscene or otherwise). Instead,
we open up a liminal space in which we and others might reflect on the possibilities of and
for obscenity in the classroom. We would like teachers and students to consider getting
dirty, bloody, and disgusting, not to promote ugliness, perversion, or hate, but to push the
boundaries of clean and easy pedagogies, and to live with physical, feeling, and desiring
bodies—mind/bodies with(out) shame or guilt.

zek (2008: 17), “there is an inhuman core in all of us,” then the
If, according to Zi

“predominant way of maintaining a distance toward the inhuman’s . . . intrusive proximity
is politeness.” But politeness is ambiguous:

This is what is wrong in politically correct attempts to moralize or even directly penalize modes
of behavior which basically pertain to civility (like hurting others with vulgar obscenities of
speech, and so on): they potentially undermine the precious “middle ground” of civility, medi-
ating between uncontrolled private fantasies and the strictly regulated forms of intersubjective

zek, 2008: 19)
behavior. (Zi

Politeness in the classroom can be dangerous. Promoting classrooms as clean, safe spaces
may inadvertently cut off our abilities to engage and address contentious, offensive, and
repugnant ideas, or, worse, to recognize the obscenities of taken-for-granted educational
practices. How forcefully do institutions penetrate students with knowledge, tests, scores,
and culturally inappropriate truths? Ethically questionable and sometimes quite inhuman
practices of (knowledge) penetration followed by systematic examination are, unfortunately,
likely to produce desirable subjects (students). At the same time, all this penetration is done
under the gaze of governmental insight and statewide compensation and reward systems.
Epistemological penetration is often viewed as acceptable, while, at the same time, contro-
versial teaching topics and “conceptual taboos” are censored from state curriculums.
Ideological obscenity (as reflected in teaching and learning methods, goals, and evaluations)
is allowed, while some other forms of obscenity are eliminated (as in the curriculum) in
attempts to gentrify the monstrous.
We suggest pedagogical obscenity as a way to degentrify the monstrous. When Zi

zek
(2000: 53) theorizes the pre-ontological domain, he says: “What is at stake in the process
of ‘Oedipalization,’ the establishment of the rule of parental Law, is precisely the process of
‘gentrifying’ this monstrous otherness, transforming it into a partner within the horizon of
discursive communication.” The student–teacher–classroom dynamic is necessarily/already
a process of gentrification. This dynamic seeks to make it clean, to anesthetize it, to be the
opposite of Socrates and “un-corrupt” the youth, to make the student a member of some old
and easy order. In being obscene, teachers might attempt to disrupt, to terrorize this easy
order, to dispel innocence/ignorance and create a (not-so-safe) space for (re)constitution of
the imagination.

zek (2008) explains that the purpose of his book is
Finally, in In Defense of Lost Causes, Zi

to problematize all-too-easy alternatives to (Stalinist) terror by encouraging scholars and
readers to reinvent terror that will not let off the hook various forms of historical failure and
Wolgemuth et al. 15

monstrosity. He encourages a move beyond the narcissism of the lost cause, accepting the
full actualization of a cause while simultaneously acknowledging the risks for catastrophic
outcomes and disaster. Obscenity and perversion put teachers, students, and other potential
pedagogical objects at risk. Harmless and docile teacher–student bodies may attack and

zek, subversions might be a part of a faux
objectify others—for democratic purposes. For Zi

radicalism of liberal-capitalist order:

this is how the establishment likes its “subversive” theorists; harmless gadflies who sting us and
thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise—God

zek, 2008: 106–107)
forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it. (Zi

Living some forms of pedagogical obscenity might move scholars away from purified and
sanitized discourses and practices, enabling educators to consider and generate critical class-
room spaces that travel a delicate line between offense, discomfort, safety, and learning. We
suggest that there is much to defend in a pedagogy of obscenity in today’s complex, messy,
and unpleasant societies and cultures, and that the exchange value of obscenity may very
well be learning to live with difference of all kinds and work more critically, and therefore
ethically, with(in) and against the perversions of education. “The gap between causes and

zek, 2008: 453). There is no guarantee that pedagogies of obscenity
effects is irreducible” (Zi

will produce positive educational or societal outcomes, yet obscenity is here and with us.
How do we respond?

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

ORCID iD
Jennifer R Wolgemuth https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4124-2239

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