PERVERTING EXPECTATIONS WITH PLEASURE: CENTERING STUDENT 
PLEASURE TO EXPLORE STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES WITH ALIENATION 

 

By 

 

Jay McClintick 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A THESIS 

 

Submitted to 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

 

Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy—Master of Arts 

 

2018 

 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

 

PERVERTING EXPECTATIONS WITH PLEASURE: CENTERING STUDENT 
PLEASURE TO EXPLORE STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES WITH ALIENATION 

 

By 

 

Jay McClintick 

 

The following thesis documents the primary researcher and author’s experience 

as they came to approach their research design before moving into a research project 

that involves student interviews, their writing, and student vignettes. It explores 

specifically students experiences of pleasure within a First-Year Writing (FYW) 

classroom so they may articulate their expectations when it comes to participating in 

their university and FYW class. The study highlights how most students expect a level of 

alienation caused by the institution based on past education experiences, and how 

students grew when they found themselves in a learning environment they reported as 

welcoming. 

 

 

 

This thesis is dedicated to the students and teachers of WRA 101. 
The most important lessons I learned through listening to them. 

 

 

iii 
 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 
 

Thank you to my committee Jacqueline Rhodes and Trixie Long Smith for their 

invaluable feedback and more valuable patience. Thank you Hop Along for your album 

Bark Your Head Off, Dog for providing a soundtrack while I worked on this. Thank you 

Autumn Laws for constantly pushing me to work on my thesis, and all the other unseen 

support you gave that I couldn’t possibly name in a single page. Most of all, thank you 

Julie Lindquist, my committee chair, for your patience, your generosity, your empathy, 

and rigorous encouragement as I struggled for a year and half to find out what it was I 

wanted to say. 

 

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 
 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

Fall 2016 
 
Spring 2017   
Summer 2017 
Fall 2017 
 

INTRODUCTION 
 
CHAPTER 1: (Re)Writing My Body Into the Research Site 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER 2: Analysis of Student Experiences 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CONCLUSION: Affect Aliens and Future Research Trajectories 
 
APPENDICES 
 
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 

Vignette: Nathaniel   
 
Vignette: Ezekiel 
Vignette: Cierra 
 
Vignette: Shaelynn   
Notes On Interview Processes 
Analysis of Interviews 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 

 
APPENDIX A: Interview Questions and Release Form  
 
APPENDIX B: Link to Classroom Website 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 

 

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3 
5 
11 
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21 

25 
26 
27 
28 
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39 

44 
45 
50 

52 

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INTRODUCTION 

My five year undergraduate experience was located around the traumatic abuse I felt 

the first two years of undergraduate followed by the violence inflicted on me by my class 

as a working-class first-generation college. I saw myself run out of my home state by my 

abuser, and suddenly alienated from every other college student I met my age from then 

on. I did not know other 20 year old’s in my classes who needed to work in order to 

afford the roof over their head, who weren’t worried about becoming homeless, who 

went long periods without eating because they could not afford to, and I certainly did 

not know who to speak to about my chronic PTSD. These undergraduate experiences 

lifted me from the rails of the neoliberal, idyllic promises I had been told from a youth 

and on. I found myself following this rail from a parallel position: totally removed from 

any sense of what a normative college experience is supposed to be like while still 

completing my degree. 

This experience made me deeply invested in questions of power on college campuses, 

and especially what it means to be a teacher for students who also experience alienation 

as they attempt to earn their degrees. It created a resolve for me to learn to be an 

advocate for college students in whatever ways I could attempt. I took an especially deep 

interest in First-Year Writing (FYW) because it was both a transitional space but also a 

space of gatekeeping within the university. 

My goal as a FYW instructor then became two-fold: to position myself so students 

saw me as someone willing to advocate for them, and attempt to normalize the 

experience of alienation they feel during their undergraduate. All this while teaching 

them some skills to anticipate, interrogate, act on, and reflect on that alienation. As I 

taught, the means to implement my goals as an instructor became so pressing I needed 

1 
 

to formally investigate it as a research project. This thesis is the result of that research 

project. Its goals is more personal than communal: it is a grounding and reflective 

statement I plan to use in order to reorient my teaching and research practices around 

better articulated goals and forms. 

It is divided into three parts:  

1.  A narrative of how I arrived both as an embodied subject of 

student/teacher/researcher for the Fall 2017 class which became my research 

site 

2.  An analysis of the data I collected provided by my research participants using 

their interviews, my own impressions, and the students’ writing 

3.  Conclusions drawn from a comparative analysis of my narrative and my 

students data. 

I conduct this research project as work of orienting myself in the ways I need to 

articulate future research questions. A year ago I would struggle to articulate what it is I 

wanted to study or research in the academy. I knew my praxis, but not a method to 

inform it. The method of this thesis approaches that, it (re)mixes my creative writing 

with the genre of academic discussion and research project. I use poetry and creative 

nonfiction sidelong with interview analyses and scholarly perspectives from the field of 

rhetoric and composition to arrive at my conclusions about alienation on college 

campuses and what implications for future research comes with this project. 

Writing this has made me realize what I really want is for better methods for 

teachers to be advocates for their students against a university that wishes to colonize 

them. This whole thing will probably end up in the garbage can, but the work of 

articulating that made it worth heaping together all this trash. 

 

2 
 

CHAPTER 1: (Re)Writing My Body Into the Research Site 

 

In The Function of Theory in Composition Raúl Sánchez makes the assertion that 

writing “encompasses representation, but is not limited to it” (16). It instead carries “is a 

phenomenon of constant (re)circulation, one that promises the representation of 

something else but never actually delivers” (95). This nondelivery, I believe, is 

fundamental to the trajectory of this thesis as it’s created from and around this research 

project, but the writing itself, in its constant (re)circulation, is developing this thesis in a 

trajectory I cannot predict. Because of that, I will make the argument that it is 

worthwhile to narrativize my experiences leading up to teaching the class I collected 

data for, as both a method of research, but as a means to generate insights that 

otherwise might not exist with a less dedicated approach to writing about my class (such 

as summarizing the conditions but not telling my story of that class). 

This decision exists to practice the thesis under multiple contexts of theoretical 

inquiry. Theory is recognized as something that is theorize but developed through 

multiple axes. A narrative of the class I taught creates one of those theories by mapping 

my experience as teacher as then something to compare to the insights of my students. 

The embodied experience is worth documenting because it existed within this research 

project, not just as the person recording, interviewing, and collecting data, but as the 

teacher who provided the site of labor in the first place. William Banks writes that 

“regardless of how distant we can get ourselves from the embodied experiences of our 

lives, if we do not find ways back to those bodies, those experiences, we run the risk of 

impoverishing our theories and pedagogies” (21). 

3 
 

As I consider the narrative of my course, I wish to write through my body so the 

writing “makes the same (often) tentative steps the body does” (25). Gloria Anzaldúa 

claimed writing as a “gesture of the body” (5). And it is worth noting the writing of this 

narrative is a gesture extending my reach through time. By using journal entries, poetry, 

and memory, I will participate in a process of that (re)circulation Sánchez mentions. The 

promise of something else that never quite delivers. To me this is, by nature a queer 

process. A claim I backup with Rhodes and Alexander’s Techne where they describe 

queer composing as “a composing that is not a composing, a call in many ways to acts of 

de- and un- and re-composition” (“Composing While Queer”). With this approach 

comes a dimension of danger. 

I lay bare the fact that intention did not always undergird the implementation of this 

class. Yergeau writes of of the “thereness” of autistic people even in the midst of being 

clinically and rhetorically designated as absent. She describes the thereness as “autism’s 

slippery locatedness [which] defies arrival” (41). The gestures of the autistic accrues in 

power through its not always intendedness. As the narrative below will describe, there 

were moments of non-intention that affectively changed dimensions of my class. These 

points “hold multiple locational resonances, signifying the unruly unfixity of those who 

are racialized, disabled, and queered” (41). If I refuse to name the overarching design of 

this thesis, it is to recognize my own body under a sign of neuroqueerness and 

neuroqueer writing that follows patterns and circulations, but is unable to satisfy linear, 

logical designs.  

 

 

 

4 
 

Fall 2016 

I read Julie Lindquist’s “Class Affects Classroom Affectations,” hunched over the 

kitchen counter of my tiny apartment because I lacked a desk at home. The simple lack 

of desk displayed my class and instantly made me interested in Lindquist’s work. I was a 

week out to teaching my first class and recognizing I already had the wrong attitude 

toward teaching: “I begin with a consideration of how class has largely been treated as a 

problem of rational inquiry in composition theory and pedagogy--a situation that… 

brackets off matters of affect in thinking about how class identifications operate 

relationally in the classroom” (188). Before teaching, affective dimensions of the 

classroom never really entered my mind. I did not consider the emotional experiences of 

my students as something that could “integrate their affective experiences of class into 

more systemic and productive understandings of social processes” (189). 

I came to graduate school expecting I could just teach (and discipline students 

toward) radical ideas and thought because they had no choice in the matter. Lindquist 

taught me this formative notion that I could not divorce my students emotional lives 

from the rational inquiry I might impose, nor expect them to buy into that inquiry. This 

troubled for me the idea of how to reach students who are traditionally resistant to ideas 

that upend their own emotional ties to their values. I had to reframe teaching in such a 

way that took into account that “We understand class as a problem of distribution of 

resources, but we experience it affectively, as an emotional process” (Lindquist, 192). 

Perhaps the thing I found most important to learn (and then teach) is that emotion itself 

is a valuable resource for students to draw on. It was not just the point of Pathos in the 

rhetorical triangle, but a set of tools that can be used to then model larger sites of 

5 
 

inquiry, “Since emotions are situated and constructed, emotional responses are acts of 

will and social imagination” (201). 

It also peeled back for me, the simple fact that my social imagination of the 

classroom was being shaped by my emotional body outside the class. I started writing 

poetry to my students before I met them. Some of this is copied below: 

 

from Syllab(i)(us) 

 

WHAT DO YOU TELL YOUR STUDENTS? 

  

spend time as the tortoise trapped on its back 

gulls squawking over you 

beaks like scythes 

brought down on your marrow-soft belly 

I say, "Stress makes diamonds" 

I say, "Stress makes..." 

makes me ask 

if my sister's deep shame 

causes her to unlace her wrists 

because I'm here teaching and not there 

can I blame myself the way coal blames its lack of stress 

for leaving stains 

on your hands 

your lungs 

6 
 

in the climate? 

listen class 

I dropped out my first college and did just fine 

anyone can leave whenever they like 

  

WHAT IS IT YOU WANT TO TEACH? 

  

living in the world is a series of questions 

be or not be? 

I spent a whole year of college asking that 

with the bottle of codeine under the seat of my car 

I lived like a bedbug 

applying myself to the wood grain until I disappeared? 

if you disappear completely 

if you say 

"I'm not here 

this isn't happening" 

and step out of class to sit in the 20 degree weather 

without jacket or hat 

so the cold wind can wind your kiting head into its body 

can you choose to tell anyone? 

I am not your guidance counselor 

or even your teacher 

I'm the man in that Cortazar story 

7 
 

waking from a hospital bed into this one 

dragged to the altar 

the knife seeded in my belly is pulled up 

it’s your face up in the moon 

watching me teach you that any knowledge is an exchange of loss 

 

Before I recognized it as such, alienation was already a central site of emotion I was 

exploring. It would be a while before these senses came in more keenly with Sara 

Ahmed’s help. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion she describes emotions as shaping 

the very surfaces of bodies (4) and that this surface was understood in the emotional 

experiences I had  with others. As Ahmed would go on to write in Queer 

Phenomenology, “shaped by contact with objects and with others, with 'what' is near 

enough to be reached. Bodies may even take shape through such contact, or take the 

shape of that contact. What gets near is both shaped by what bodies do, which in turn 

affects what bodies can do” (54) My own experiences of alienation were central to 

recognizing something was deeply wrong in my undergraduate experience, and the way 

my body pressed up against undergraduate experiences not my own made my sense of 

alienation all the sharper. The following vignette of a class in Fall of 2014 describes this 

experience aptly: 

 

December in Syracuse, New York. Winter teeth digging into the city now. Snow piles, 

settles like migrant birds, won’t fly away until April. At the unheated FedEx plant I work 

at, they’ve doubled the amount of packages to ship, and I’m loading trailers at four 

hundred boxes an hour in the frigid cold. A thin sheen of ice that bites your fingers coats 

8 
 

the metal floors and walls of trailers. My cold hands ruined so many pair of gloves they 

eventually just stay naked. They move two thousand pounds of freight in four hour 

segments: lifting, pulling, pushing, and throwing things to keep pace with the escalated 

Christmas volume. 

When I get off work late that night, I drive home dazed and the shower peels dirt off 

my skin till the water in the tub is brackish and dark. The next morning when I wake up 

my hands have locked up. Their rigid and in so much pain I can’t cook breakfast or make 

a cup of coffee. I barely have time to throw on clothes before I am walking a mile and a 

half through the snowy city to a class on campus. The walk is so far I only make it once a 

day, but I always walk to save my money. On the way I drop into the health clinic to grab 

some fruit from the lobby they set out. This detour so regular I barely think about it. I 

don’t eat anything yet, it still hurts too much to hold things in my hands. 

When I get to class, it is one of those large science lecture hall classes. The kind 

students take en masse for credit to graduate. I am slumped back in my chair. I felt my 

whole body throbbing in pain and found myself staring at the lights overhead. I did not 

have a problem with the teacher or the material, but I was in so much physical pain, so 

overtaken with exhaustion, that I could not think beyond my shaking hands. Even my 

hunger couldn’t be heard over the sound of my body’s aches. When I overheard two 

students complain about some other homework assignment, it felt like once again I was 

an alien on another planet. No one else seemed to show up to classes with bruises, open 

sores. I was reminded once of when I split my head open on a crossbar at work. I kept 

loading boxes until my manager told me to wash the blood off my face. I had an open 

gash on my scalp that felt wet when touched. For days I joked about it just to make 

myself feel normal around my peers while this sore slowly closed up. 

9 
 

 

My drive to study the emotional experiences of students comes because my 

experience of academic institutions is a deeply emotional and alienating one. That 

alienation is one I’ve found to be a common experience for most people who pursue 

higher education. When this education is still structured for the wealthy, the white, the 

male, the able-bodied, etc. In the above essay by Lindquist, she too mentions this 

problem of a structural, institutional deficit at universities writ large: “Richard E. Miller 

rightly warned that ‘the tendency to focus on the individual classroom as transformative 

site serves to distract… [from] institutional forces that bring teachers and students 

together’ (124)” (207). But like Lindquist I identified too closely with the role a teacher 

can play in advocating for teachers that, what I wanted for my classes was to redress my 

experiences of (and my students, potentially) alienation by “understanding [sic] wider 

institutional contexts in no way abolishes the equally pressing need to understand 

classes as distinctive sites of social performance” (Lindquist, 207).   

My working relationship with Lindquist, since reading her essay has been centered 

around trying to teach students that sites of emotional experience are not only a valid 

starting point in their own inquiry processes, but they are sometimes necessary. I 

believe the Fall 2017 class worked very closely with asking students to process their 

emotional responses to both our class and their broader campus, so they could use 

writing as a mode of inquiry into those emotions. 

However the emotional experience of alienation, I did not feel could be the thing 

students focus on. A class themed around alienation assumes all students are managing 

some amount of alienation on campus, which, while probably true, asking students to 

focus explicitly on alienation would center their class experience around pain. Sara 

10 

 

Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion makes the worthwhile point that, “Pain is 

hence bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to the 

surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places. Our question becomes 

not so much what is pain, but what does pain do” (27). I wanted students to ask 

themselves what alienation and pain can do for them. A body reacts to pain by trying to 

end it, if a student is in pain at the university how can they actionably respond to their 

institution? But if I spent a semester asking students reflect on pain, I worried the 

students would begin to see pain as generative emotional capital and rather than engage 

in it as a site of earnest inquiry, would focus on the sort of emotional relationships they 

could connect to pain in order to earn a passing grade. As Lindquist points out in an 

anecdote I suspect is all too common in writing classes, “I once tutored a student who 

confessed that [their] tragic account… was total fiction, contrived to earn rewards from a 

teacher who saw emotional “authenticity” as the mark of good writing” (197). 

That first semester of teaching was painful and clumsy. Since then the best advice I 

could give to new teachers was, “Do what you know and do best, show them that, and be 

open to learning more from your students than they’ll learn from you.” During this 

semester, I set my resolve on theming the Spring 2016 class on Disruption and 

Intervention. 

 

Spring 2017 

 

from Birthday Poems 2017 

 

PAPERS 

11 
 

 

A student asks 

other students 

what their birthday 

traditions are. 

I do not tell 

mine is folding 

dozens of hands 

into my 

intestines. 

They want grades. 

Their writing 

notched on my body, 

me conducting 

their car crashes. 

They’re good writers 

though. I’m all 

imposter, unsure 

I belong anywhere 

that’s not a road 

in away’s direction. 

This my chosen 

profession. 

Eli says my 

12 
 

second profession 

is feeling bad 

for myself. 

I just want to be 

a vampire’s mirror or 

the set of clothes 

without a face. 

 

Spring 2017 I found myself approaching a something only touched on here. I began a 

class structured on ideas around writing I found myself unable to reconcile with the 

curriculum. Writing, the turn from thought to action, that was what I wanted to teach 

my students. All their projects fells around those series of acts. But as the poem above 

shows, despite this being my chosen profession I was gripped by a fear of being in front 

of my students that I later described in that collection as “Do my students know I’m 

afraid/they’ll spot some seam in me?/That one day I’ll be a pig/with its belly slit and 

guts spilling,/all me spilling out before them.” 

I considered myself an excellent teacher when it came to fostering an interpersonal 

relationship. In some senses I’d mastered the “deep acting” Lindquist called for in her 

previous paper, because these emotions of terror were never apparent to my students, 

and despite a spectrum of differences between students and myself, they were fond of 

me and the work we did in class. 

This experience I reflect back on as imagining as a closeting. It is worth going into 

some detail here because in the next semester of teaching I would quite literally be 

forced out of the closet by my own mental illness and transness becoming too apparent 

13 
 

to not be read on my body by my students. In “Risking Queer,” Monson and Rhodes 

describe the problem with a writing classroom focused on authenticity and 

appropriateness. “That is, students (as well as their teachers) learn rules for talking and 

writing and behaving sexually, according to prescribed gender roles and position within 

the classroom” (81). 

This moment of approved sexualities presented and prescribed literally happened in 

my class this semester. Giving my students some amount of control, I offered them to 

design a game/exercise that the entire class would participate. Afterwards the students 

would describe what lessons on rhetoric and composition this particular game would 

teach. This activity happened later in the semester, and was developed with my mind 

thinking about those ideas around disruption and intervention being necessary tools 

students needed to wield. What I found was my body suddenly alienated by my students 

when they created a game called “Musical Horse.” 

The game was simple, two groups would enter a round where one would select a 

music video for the other group to attempt to act out a scene of while the music played 

(the suggested example was Beyonce’s iconic dropping the bucket of water on herself). A 

student judge would determine the success for each group, and upon failure to act out 

the scene well enough, the judge awarded and a letter (until Horse was spelled) and that 

group lost. The only rule I imposed was the ability to veto a video if I felt it would be 

offensive to the room for the players to act it out. Rather than try to pick a music video 

that would be complex and difficult to act out, my students decided to use 

embarrassment to coerce the opposing group into not acting out the music video. 

This turn began with the video by The Lonely Island called “Jizz in My Pants” and 

escalated from there. In all the encounters students chose phallocentric videos boys 

14 
 

were asked to act out. Students found these funny because out of place male sexuality is 

amusing. They never once tried to bring female sexuality into the room. One was a 

frivolous display that students laughed at while the other, never considered, speaks to 

the views students held toward that performance. Either to the thought they must keep 

those selves repressed while maleness is expressed, or (but more also) that female 

sexuality was too obscene to bring before the class. 

The students thrilled in this game and its success taught me a fundamental problem: 

“Students emerge as docile bodies whose... desire is directed through “acceptable” 

channels (for knowledge, nominally), masking other workings of desire… and in effect 

colonizing those bodies” (Monson and Rhodes, 85). What this experience taught me was 

such games like the one described above might disrupt my authority but the structural 

foundations of the campus just made it possible for those disruptions to be directed 

back on myself and anyone else who might experience the above activity as alienating. 

Disruption and intervention held nothing transformative, those tools could be 

practiced and honed, but without any sort of exploration of why they were needed, I 

realized I made a class better at advocating for whatever things the students already 

believed. After all, if protests disrupt institutions of power and oppression, institutions 

know how to be just as rhetorically effective at disruption with the police baton. 

 

Summer 2017 

Rather than focus on the experience of alienation, I determined the better way to 

map alienation in the classroom would be to ask the question of, “When does alienation 

arrive in the classroom?” This then led to the expression of expectations. I saw 

expectations as moment of boundary, the crossing into or out of alienation. If students 

15 
 

expected the class to be alienating, then mapping the experience of their changing 

expectations would allow me to see how they were preparing for or experiencing a 

moment alienation on campus and in class. 

But expectations cannot be the single theme of a class, either. Instead, I followed 

through on a proposal I made during the spring 2017 Queer Conversations I 

participated in. In this proposal I was responding to Alexander and Rhodes assertion 

that “A number of interrelated knowledge/power complexes make queerness impossible 

in composition” (179). My queer body, initially took umbrage to the thought it could not 

will a queer composition classroom. But of course, “Sex, especially non-normative 

sexual relations, is never ‘appropriate’ in the classroom.” This outlook my students had 

already reflected back on me during the spring semester. But I actually used Rhodes as 

the site of inspiration for the class by taking up her notion of “becoming the fool” in her 

video essay “The Failure of Queer Pedagogy.” In it Rhodes suggest a queer pedagogy 

must resist the normative narrative of mastery as “logic of mastery, of individual 

attainment, and of institutional assessment of that attainment” sets limitations on one’s 

range of teaching ability. Teaching to mastery can only help the master. It also, like with 

Lindquist’s advocating for deep acting, put emotional vulnerability as central to 

teaching. One risked all their authority as teacher by admitting they were not the master 

of the subject. I wanted to use this insight to present a perverse classroom by getting 

students to pursue pleasure in their written inquiries, and, when the moment was 

presented, record their findings and failings at mastery of their pursuit. 

I found in Melanie Yergeau’s Authoring Autism an argument that autistic fixation on 

acts of echolalia and echopraxia are often regarded as both pleasurable and 

mastaburtory. “Echoes are attractive, despite displacing the human sociality that often 

16 
 

attends romantic or sexual attraction... Desire is a strong compulsion, pressing 

neuroqueer subjects to demi-rhetorically engage the repetitive, the ritualistic, the 

completely embodied” (199). While these repetitions could not be completely mapped in 

the writing classroom they did provide a framework for designing a curriculum that 

would encourage students to make the moves I needed in order to get clearer 

articulations of their emotional experience while trying to make that emotional and 

intellectual labor in the pursuit of pleasure. 

In this way, I sequenced the projects in the following way: a narrative around 

something they took pleasure in doing, an analysis of the university as a space orienting 

these students toward and away the things they take pleasure in, a disciplinary literacy 

project that researches what discipline the university offers most aligns with that pursuit 

of pleasure, and a remix project built around how students might remix the university so 

it better allows that pursuit of pleasure. On top of this, I asked students to write 15 

writing assignments of their own design about something they enjoyed, written in the 

way they would find most pleasurable. I wanted them to fixate on things that did not 

center on preparing them for college in a traditional sense.  

While I was able to make these articulations, a sudden event in my life disrupted my 

hope that I would be able to work closely with my students. 

The following passage below was written mere days before the semester began, and 

became the letter I used to first publicly out myself as a trans woman. For almost a year 

before I’d been toying in my head with the function of Sara Ahmed’s concept of 

orientations in a Queer Phenomenology. But true sense of disorientation didn’t hit until 

the momentum of my assigned gender finally started to slow and my body stopped 

disappearing into maleness. But when it appeared before me it felt catastrophic. The 

17 
 

disorientation shattered my involvement in the world (Ahmed, 177). “Disorientation 

involves failed orientations: bodies inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape” 

(Ahmed,133). At the moment before my research was to begin. I found it was not just 

the university as an institution that did not extend my shape, but my own body began to 

turn on me: 

 

Reorientations 

We are shopping at Target, at the back of the store with the gardening supplies when 

an impulse fires in my brain like a sudden phone call I reach to answer without thinking. 

Hedge clippers hang with their teeth. I see myself carrying them casually over my 

shoulder to the bathroom, see my pants curdling on the bathroom floor in a stall, I 

crouch down over the teeth, and the blades close their mouth. I have to leave the aisle, 

whole body trembling, to stop imagining castrating myself. It is not a new thought or 

even an uncommon one. 

The first time I thought I openly thought I might be a woman, I hushed the thought 

quick as a child speaking out of turn in church. I was walking to campus, headphones in 

and body tense as I passed construction workers lounging beside the parking garage 

with their lunch. I thought I was on guard because you keep your guard up as a queer, 

but it was really my fear of their masculinity coming into focus on me, an imposter. My 

body was like the apartments passing to my left. The beams of bones and panes of fresh 

glass, the insulation like exposed muscle flapping in the wind. I did not realize it would 

take many hands to finish me. To recover my beaten remains. 

After I was beaten and raped by a woman, I needed three years before I was able to 

open up to another woman. To have meaningful friendships with women again. I did not 

18 
 

find company in masculinity in the interim. I stayed like a dangling rope in a well: wet, 

frayed, and alone. When I lived by the ocean I used to walk up and down the beach at 

night, spray running up to grip my ankles and making my shoes and socks wet. I wanted 

to wade into the ocean more times than I could count. I drove to an empty lot in winter 

and walked up thinking this would be the night I died. But the ocean, a big blot of 

blackness, made me feel so small that it made dying seem unimportant. It washed out 

the panic attacks, the anxiety, it left me neutral. Eventually I carried that neutral out of 

the beach, was able to talk to women without feeling on guard, able to have sex without 

weeping. I still wanted to take the kitchen shears and take sex out of my life entirely—

like lifting your tongue out its mouth so you no longer needed to worry about all the risk 

that goes into speaking. 

I told Matt over text because I was not ready to say the words out loud: “I don’t think 

I’m a boy.” For a week I struggled to think of anything else, stamped into the dirt by 

anxiety. I either lied in bed sleeping while I felt an axe chopping into my chest, or I 

walked aimlessly about my neighborhood. There was an abandoned school on Holmes 

street, boarded up and windows shattered. The playground reclaimed by weeds with 

only pull-up and monkey bars left. No one approached it, no one played within the ribs 

of the building. I felt this building was me, no longer a school but a dead end. There 

were dozens of dead ends to the north, cut off by the tracks that trains rolled through at 

night. 

The switch was thrown after I was wading into sleep one night. My brain stretching 

its thoughts to someplace beyond me. I watched lights flicker on and off, with as much 

control as I have over my neighbor’s house. Two voices spoke: “My thoughts have always 

been in a woman’s voice.” “It’s because we are a woman.” The next morning I tried 

19 
 

denying it, but the feeling stayed like ticks worked deep in the skin. I thought, “Is this a 

side-effect of my SSRI?” I waited a whole week for the feeling to fall out my head, but it 

grew roots. A whole wood was beginning to bloom. 

One way I relax my body is concentrating on a scene in the forest. There is rain. I am 

running from something, mud splashing as my feet tear through paths tangled with 

roots. There are wolves, men, thoughts chasing me. I come into a clearing and there is a 

cave lit. There is always a woman inside the cave, and she is the one who greets me, who 

promises me the cave can’t be found by anyone else. We sit and talk, and I am able to do 

more than run. I am able to speak. 

I began to say out loud what I knew. I began to come out on the same day as an 

eclipse. All this darkening was not permanent but passing and now I felt a light opening. 

An impulse to castrate: certainly locked in trauma, was not just a move to end things, I 

realized, but to transform to other things. 

I am not ready to call myself woman yet, though, I know I will eventually. I can see 

that path clearly now. Away from my assigned destination—I’ve been walking that way 

for a while now. Away from masculinity that repulses me and scares me, into the 

companionship of womanhood that is the only place I feel truly relaxed. I know this gulf 

will widen, that it will be more difficult than letting my body disappear and walk into the 

churning bile it was told to wade into since birth. I am not that. I am opening myself to 

the many hands that might teach me and make me. To see gender as more than a noose 

tightening, but an opening I am threading myself through to stitch something together 

stronger than what I commanded to be. A wind moves through me, and the heads of 

many trees shake and answer. Water falls from their leaves, but the rain has long since 

cleared. 

20 

 

Fall 2017 

Pleasure, ironically, was in short supply the semester I taught the class I planned to 

do my research on. Over the span of the year, I’d been slowly climbing down into a pit 

that became the worst depressive cycles to hit me in five years (a pit I still find myself 

clambering to get out of). That, combined with the stress of coming out as trans, made 

the Fall 2017 semester incredibly difficult. Some days I would come into the classroom 

shaking, my tongue a stone in my mouth, the tension in my chest making it seem like I 

was teaching while pinned underneath a car. It was noticeable. 

Sometimes I simply needed to cancel class before it started. Three times over the 

semester I needed to end class before we were 30 minutes into it, as I felt like I would 

otherwise breakdown in front of my students. While I asked my students to use pleasure 

as a site of inquiry in their projects, my experience was so far removed from pleasure 

that even the act of teaching lost its appeal certain weeks. 

Perhaps the biggest way this impacted my students was that they did not get any 

grades back until the end of the semester. This meant my students did all of their work 

that semester without the real benefit of any dedicated feedback. They did get feedback 

in minor moments, at conferences and in conversations after class. Eventually, I had to 

surrender to the prying about grades and tell my students that it wouldn’t happen 

anytime soon. I made my own inabilities into a classroom lesson, discussing how the 

labor contract I had with the university prioritized my personal academics over their 

education. I did as Rhodes suggested and surrendered any sense of mastery. My 

vulnerabilities, somehow, endeared me to my students. 

I survived the semester, but I make this note to say I fundamentally believe it shaped 

the data I collected. When designing this class to be researched, I fully expected my 

21 
 

project to happen alongside a class taught with more care and attention than I had time 

for in previous semesters. I purposefully put on a massive course load the first year of 

study so the second year could be open to more time working with my students for this 

class. I wanted more structured lessons planned more thoroughly with regular, attentive 

feedback for the work students turned in. I wanted the time to truly work with my 

students. I did not teach the class I wanted to teach for this research project. My body 

inserted itself in the way of my intellectual goals. On the one hand, mounting diagnoses 

of disabilities made it impossible to engage with my students beyond the bare minimum, 

on the other hand I found my body changing shape in front of these students in ways I 

was scared to show but also personally eviscerated myself for hiding it. 

The climax of this is detailed in the poem below. It was a moment that caused me to 

cancel my classes, joking that I tripped in a stairwell. 

 

Blush 

  

Analisa tells me my nose bleeds 

just as I leave the office. 

Everyone watches a thing 

fall out me like a rib tugged 

off to cusp a new body. 

When I rub my nose, 

my fingers return with blood. 

Boyskin worn today, hoodie bloodied. 

I picture blood a floral pattern 

22 

 

my body carries, a thing falls 

from my body like a tongue. 

I am without words. I call no one. 

I feel the drop in me. 

I have not made a bottom or held 

in the rush, the scream of pine 

needle pushed back—my feet 

walk me down the hallway— 

the pine is tugged back farther— 

door to stairwell closes behind me— 

the pine snaps back and wood whips 

and needles descend like talons 

and I’ve punched myself in the face 

so hard I stumble down steps. 

I smash the elbow in the wall, 

I press the palm to the wall, 

a thing falls out me 

and I slam the head into the wall, 

fall back dazed still punching the face 

till the door opens 

and I’m in public again. 

I do not feel pain from the body, 

only wish to see it, by degrees, 

crumble, I take a lighter and burn 

23 

 

all my fingers, I smash my face 

to draw more blood, I bite hands. 

I say nothing. I do not cry, feel grief. 

There is an empty, a thing fell 

out me. In its place: this perpetual wounding, 

concussions spread like hands 

pressed to windows of a locked 

burning building, this body the building, 

and I am the fire, and I am the building 

and I am the one watching it, smiling. 

 

As I hope this poem displays, a lot of things propelling my behavior that semester 

was not as intentional as I would’ve hoped. This was a neuroqueer pedagogy I ended up 

bringing into the class more often than not, and the consequences of which are the 

entire reason I wished to write out this section so clearly. I do not think I could write out 

this thesis as clearly without first gesturing to everything propelling me as I entered 

(and frankly crashed) in this class. The crash was never intentional. “When intent is 

offered in conjunction with the neuroqueer, it becomes illegible: we only know what 

intent is when that intent is read via pro-social measures” (Yergeau, 37). A class can 

exist with asocial students, but when the teacher is rendered asocial the class quickly 

becomes unstable. I think it would be worthwhile site of inquiry to go more into the 

implications of what that instability meant for teaching and research, but that particular 

site of research seems somewhat distant from what needs to be done at this point. 

 

 

24 

 

CHAPTER 2: Analysis of Student Experiences 

In this chapter I will start by providing some context of my participants then for how 

data was collected, outlining the interview process (and my impression of how it went). I 

provide analysis of the sort of patterns and trends I saw from the students who 

participated in my study. 

Fifteen of my twenty-seven student class elected to participate in this study. The four 

students I chose based on a careful reflection of the work they did in class and the 

identities I felt would tell the most robust story of the class I taught. The four students 

are as follows below. Their vignettes will go into detail of how I got to know the complex 

lives of each of these students, while providing a grounding look of why I thought the 

four here would provide an insightful exchange of differing experiences. 

Some basic facts of each that I can speak to for certain: 

  Nathaniel is a latinx man from Texas who comes from a college educated 

family with a middle class income 

  Ezekiel is a white man from Michigan who comes from a college educated 

family with a middle class income  

  Cierra is a Black woman from Detroit, Michigan, it is unclear what class her 

family is or if they were college educated, but my sense from the way she 

spoke of her family is that she came from similar backgrounds 

  Shaelynn is a white woman from rural Michigan, her sister also has a degree 

and has implied in the past a middle class income 

 

 

 

25 

 

Vignette: Nathaniel 

Nathaniel lingered back after class more often than not. He, like me, is a transplant 

from the south. Though our stories radically depart from there. He is a Latinx man who 

took the chance with our class to write about his dissatisfaction with going to school 

here in Michigan. He expressed a sense of alienation about the students around not 

feeling very “mature.” I did not challenge him on those feelings, but instead listened 

closely to the ways he struggled to orient himself here. 

He identified things such as the lack of students driving cars on campus and an 

annoyance that other students complained constantly and unduly (a thing I also felt 

annoyed by coming from a working class family that saw work as necessary and not 

something to complain about). He wrote papers in class articulating anger over the 

emptiness he felt in the Spartan Will branding. However, I found myself at odds with 

Nathaniel in some ways. He spoke openly of being pro-surveillance, anti net-neutrality, 

and pro conceal and carry on campus (a notion which, as a teacher, makes me feel more 

in danger than ever safe). He even presented on his pro-gun stance shortly after news of 

another mass shooting. 

One morning after class left, I sat at my desk writing out an email when he 

approached me and sat on the desk to the front of the room. We began to chat, and at 

one point he mentioned this was the one class he felt open to express himself. Shortly 

after this confession, the bar holding up the desk he sat on bent suddenly, and he fell to 

the floor. I rushed over to help him and he, laughing, told me he did not need help. He 

joked that this was the most exciting thing to happen to him all week. While he did not 

ever bring it up, I got the sense from this interaction that it was not just alienation from 

26 

 

the campus Nathaniel felt, but also a sense of isolation in a campus community he did 

not see himself reflected in. 

 

Vignette: Ezekiel 

I read into Zeke’s body that of a white conservative student upon our first day of 

class. Zeke had this way of staring at you while you taught that made me always feel like 

I was being judged. I think also I read onto his white masculine body a conservative 

stance and violence. He looks like he played football in high school. 

One particular moment of that stood at as alarming and upsetting was when we did 

conferences. It is was earlier on in the semester, a strategy I liked to employ to better get 

to know and speak with students one on one. This particular day I was wearing a dress. 

One of the the things I did very intentionally was the first time I appeared in a full 

wardrobe of women’s clothes was during conferences with students so I could minimize 

any reactions of alarm. I’d outed myself as queer and had been toying with feminine 

looks since before this meeting, but these meetings with students were the occasion they 

undeniably saw me in only women’s clothing. 

Zeke sat in my office perhaps a foot away from me, and kept his gaze so glued to me 

it unnerved me. It was alarming in two ways: the first was the fear my student was 

keeping some inner anger toward my identity carefully concealed, the second was my 

own sexuality rising up in an unexpected moment of desire as I recognized how 

handsome his eyes were. Zeke barely spoke during the meeting, like always he was not 

that talkative. But that sharp gaze of his told me things were happening beyond his 

mask.  

27 

 

I learned through Zeke’s writing that his interests were actually in art. During the 

class he made a podcasts talking through photography, as well as an assignment where 

he travelled to flint and took pictures of the city itself. I also learned from my follow-up 

interview with him that some of that attentive judging might have been because his 

mother was finishing up her rhetoric and composition PhD at another midwestern 

university. According to Zeke, his mother held my department not in the highest 

opinion, and psyched Zeke out to believe he was going to have an incredibly hard time in 

his writing class. 

 

Vignette:Cierra 

If Zeke happened to give me an uncomfortable experience that made me truncate 

our conference, Cierra was so friendly I had a hard time asking her to leave my office. 

After our conference was over, she simply stayed in my office for almost an hour. She 

talked pretty openly about her experience of being a Black woman at a predominantly 

white campus, told me about her family, how her dad called her constantly as she lived 

this double life of responsible student for her family and partier with her friends on 

campus. Many times she showed up late or missed class because she slept in. 

Cierra was a working class Black woman who often treated more as a friend than a 

teacher. If I had not framed the class around pleasure, I might not have ever learned 

that she had a passion for filmmaking. After learning this, I very intentionally opened up 

the other projects in the class to multi-modal interpretations so that she could have the 

chance to not just write about film, but to make film instead. 

Because it was something we talked about inside and outside the class, Cierra felt 

comfortable with proposing to me a film project that explored the experience of being a 

28 

 

Black student at a predominantly white campus. With two other Black students, she 

created a video project interviewing Black freshmen on campus asking them about their 

experience with being a student attending a PWI. 

It is worth noting that Cierra’s treatment of me more as a friend than teacher, did 

translate into her not taking my class as seriously. While the work she was passionate 

about was some of the best work in the class, things like the daily writing assignments 

were done with as little effort as possible. On top of this Cierra liked to poke fun at me in 

class, a thing Nathaniel took opportunities to do as well. 

Along with Nathaniel, Cierra was a student who often stayed after class in order to 

speak with me personally. Again, these conversations usually involved some form of 

extra emotional labor where I was being asked to not only be a writing mentor but also a 

mentor for college in general. Work I was fine with doing, as it was one of the reasons I 

was there in the first place. 

 

Vignette: Shaelynn 

Shaelynn is perhaps the student on this list who most openly opposes the sort of 

politics I would espouse normally in a non-teacher/researcher setting. Early on in the 

semester, she wished to write about how she felt the veterinary college she hoped to 

study at wouldn’t accept her over a Black student because she wasn’t a big enough 

minority. She often carried the conservative viewpoints into our classroom, and while I 

disagreed with her and don’t think I dissuaded her in any way, I am happy she felt safe 

enough to make those expressions known. 

29 

 

Shaelynn, like Zeke, did not make any attempts to talk to me after class or take 

advantage of me as a mentor in a broader sense (worth noting only the students of color 

did). 

Shaelynn loved animals and all of her projects revolved around their care. Her 

passion to become a veterinarian she wrote about constantly. She created animal 

organization newsletters in the class. And, from her reflections it was clear that this was 

one of the first times she had the opportunity to write about the thing she wanted to. 

Perhaps the most remarkable story Shaelynn shared for me was on a class day where 

I asked students to share times their teachers made them uncomfortable. I encouraged 

them to use my teaching if they wished, although no student volunteered to do this. 

Shaelynn exchanged a story of being in an honors classroom at a rural high school: two 

friends of hers not in the class were walking through the halls being loud, they were 

clearly poorer appearing and without confronting the students outside, her teacher 

instead turned on Shaelynn’s class and loudly complained about students like 

Shaelynn’s friends and how kids with parents like that were idiots who voted for Trump. 

It was a shocking moment of classism, that students in the class who were polar 

opposites on the political spectrum sympathized with her on. 

 

It is worth noting at the end of these vignettes that none of my students in the course 

of the class ever disclosed an identity of disability or queerness. I bring this up to 

explicitly say that had these been identities to consider I would have liked to take the 

time to work with those students if given the opportunity. I like the students I have for 

this study, but since I’ve identified myself as queer and disabled, and center much of my 

theory around such work, I thought it was worthwhile to mention the absence of queer 

30 

 

and disabled bodies in this study had more to do with forces outside my control than 

any sort of oversight. To hedge the previous sentence a bit, my students might have been 

queer and/or disabled, but never chose to disclose this information and because of that 

I’ve decided to approach their interpretations of experience from positions other than 

queerness and disability. 

 

Notes On Interview Processes: 

I will begin this section with a dry description of how this interview process 

occurred, then will include a reflection after on the process. 

First, I provided students a release form during the last quarter of the semester that 

they chose to sign or not to sign. During this time I was not in the room, rather a trusted 

representative collected the signatures for me, who then returned them to my research 

adviser. My research adviser held onto these forms until the end of the semester. The 

release form can be found in the appendix. By engaging in this process I made sure I did 

not know which of my students had signed the form until after I submitted grades for 

the class. 

After I was made aware of how many students signed the release form, I reviewed my 

interview questions with my research adviser, and we both strategized on how to reach 

out to students and who to reach out to. I eventually settled on reaching out to the four 

students of this study, who promptly responded to my email. I arranged things based on 

student comfort, I asked them to determine for themselves where they would like to 

meet based on their own convenience and sense of safety in that space. We then met at 

those spaces one time for an interview that took approximately 30 minutes, each. I 

31 
 

transcribed these interviews, incompletely, purposefully leaving out material irrelevant 

to the study such as small talk, etc. to save on my own labor. 

Below is my reflection on this process: 

Because of my tight time budget and my failure to budget time, I did not conduct the 

following interviews in the way I would have liked. I would have preferred a process 

closer to what Irving Seidman described in Interviewing as Qualitative Research. 

“phenomenological interviewing.” “The method combines life-history interviewing (see 

Bertaux, 1981) and focused, in-depth interviewing informed by assumptions drawn from 

phenomenology” (15). This phenomenological approach I would have, in a more perfect 

world, like to have approached from Sara Ahmed’s understanding of phenomenology in 

Queer Phenomenology. Seidman states in this approach interviewers “use, primarily, 

open-ended questions. Their major task is to build upon and explore their participants’ 

responses those questions. The goal is to have the participant reconstruct his or her 

experience within the topic under study” (15). To contextualize this approach with what 

I mean when bringing in Sara Ahmed, let me quote here: “A queer phenomenology 

might turn to phenomenology by asking not only about the concept of orientation in 

phenomenology, but also about the orientation of phenomenology” (3). In the case of 

Seidman, I see an assumption being made about “open ended” and “explore” as spaces 

not already directed. I’m curious what arcs are taken when interviews become co-

facilitations, starting perhaps in the interviewers hands but ending in the hands of the 

participant to then question the researcher. 

And I believe Halbritter and Lindquist have done much similar work in their 

Michigan Literacy Core work. In their essay they ask “Time to Grow Them”: “But what if 

we want to learn not about ourselves, but about those who may not feel prepared to offer 

32 

 

a ‘literacy narrative’?” Halbritter and Lindquist are working through the fact that their 

participants needed the time to offer an actual literacy narrative, but also to become 

oriented to the challenge of literacy so they could then teach Halbritter and Lindquist. 

Like the authors I wished for my interviews to be “narrative data” that worked as a 

“practice of invention, not only (or primarily) as a practice of reporting.” I don’t think I 

achieved that. Partly because the scope of this project meant it would never be possible 

in the first place as Halbritter and Lindquist’s interviews were phased over years, but 

also because my interviews took place in a single session and students didn’t get the 

chance to develop a narrative in their interview. I felt this is because they weren’t exactly 

trained to do so, and I was not prepared to coach them to do it. The data collected for 

this part of the project feels, frankly, rushed. 

In many ways it makes it seem like this is a failed research project because it did not 

accomplish what I originally wanted to accomplish. But the learning that did happen in 

this project did help me better understand how I might build it in the future. I, like 

Halbritter and Lindquist would like to do work that goes deep rather than wide: “Brandt 

herself does not follow the implications of cultural and experiential dimensions of 

sponsorship in her own research, preferring to work toward conclusions about larger 

social and historical patterns” (177). Rather than literacy, I wish to follow the cultural 

and experiential dimensions of alienation at colleges by using expectations as the site of 

inquiry, so that teachers can become better advocates and allies for their students. I’m 

certain a broader, longitudinal study would work to get some kind of representation of 

historical changes in campus alienation, but those insights I feel would also be limited in 

what they could offer for teachers to do. 

33 

 

Like in Lindquist’s previously mentioned essay, I recognize the importance of 

forwarding structural changes outside the classroom, but I also believe on a class by 

class basis, we owe it to our students to advocate for them as we can. 

 

Analysis of Interviews: 

From the interviews with my students I noticed two key trends that I wish to go into 

more detail about. The first was the description of college based on the narratives 

students had been told. The other was the emotional relationship students felt they had 

with their instructors and classmates. It’s worth noting that these weren’t necessarily 

what I expected to get information about, but I found as I asked about questions of 

expectations, students expected to exist in a relationship of alienation with their schools, 

as they already felt alienated from previous school experiences. 

Ezekiel described the experience of other writing class as the following: “Theirs 

didn’t seem as fun as yours. Not as open as far as topics. I was glad I got you in that 

sense. When you’re forced to write, you have like limited topics, it’s um, like being 

forced through a small pipe.” Ezekiel’s comment was also seconded by Cierra who said, 

“I feel that’s really valuable in the class, when the teacher just allows the students to just 

be themselves, because we’re always pushed into these boxes where the school wants us 

to be like, or what, like I said with high school, they think what the college want us to be 

like. When I went to your class it’s valuable you let us get outside the box and think.” 

Cierra described this archetype of an old, stodgy professor that Nathaniel also described 

in more specific detail without knowing that Cierra had also described the same: “[I] 

expected an old teacher with strict guidelines. Never going outside the syllabus. No extra 

credit. 8 am to 9:50 whole class every Tuesday/Thursday.” That stifling feeling my 

34 

 

students experienced clued me in that the fact I allowed them to pursue and compose in 

ways of pleasure did lead me to learn what sort of experiences students found as 

alienating. Given what was said here I was reminded of Monson and Rhodes who said, 

“That is to say, the classroom, far from being an ivory tower separate or separable from 

power relations at large, necessarily inherits and refracts them” (85). My students 

experienced these power relations firsthand, I tried to answer the question of: “To what 

extent does it follow that first-year composition is the institutional site of sanctioned 

desire?” In terms of this class, my students carried an impression they were encouraged 

to pursue desires where they might not have be able to elsewhere. 

Shaelynn saw this after the first paper. When I asked her where her expectations 

changed she responded that: “Um really after the first paper. When I realized that it’s 

not like, very… boring. Like the first paper you had us write about our own thing and 

stuff we actually kinda cared about.” My students expected a lack of agency and a level 

of discipline to be administered to them during the course of the class. This framing tells 

me that school is, regularly a disciplining institution in a Foucauldian sort of manner.  

One thing all of my students said was the work load was “less” than what they 

expected and what they heard from other writing classes. This response truly surprised 

me. Given conversations I’ve had with other instructors, the syllabi I’ve seen that have 

been shared with me, and the workshops I’ve attended I do not think my workload was 

radically more or less than a normal class, and in the appendix can be found a link to my 

class website which carries instructions for assignments and projects. But in the case of 

assignments students were required to do the following: 

35 

 

  15 1 page writing assignments done in any genre over any topic they wanted, 

to be turned in at the end of the semester, but encouraged to be done one 

every other class 

  A story at least 1,000 words long that “storied their desire,” that functioned as 

the introductory literacy narrative 

  A 2,000 word essay broken into three drafts about how objects in the 

university oriented them toward or away from pursuing their pleasure on 

campus, with written vignettes over 5 objects orienting them, and a 500 word 

reflection paper 

  A project imitating a communicative feature in a discipline that followed the 

thing they found pleasure in (these took the form of videos, short-stories, 

essays, podcasts, articles, etc.), a half page proposal, and 500 word reflection 

  A remix project that included a proposal at least 300 words long and a 

reflection letter 500 words long 

  A final class reflection styled as a letter for the next set of students I’d teach 

My thought is that the case here is that the student’s labor felt less like an intellectual 

burden when it was centered on something they took pleasure in. This sense of pleasure 

led also to a sense of confidence. Suspended from a sense of alienation, many of my 

students reported back that they felt more confident in their writing than before. 

Ezekiel, while not being able to pinpoint a single moment of the class as valuable, 

explained that, “I felt more appreciative towards writing… After the first few weeks it 

was a lot easier. I can just focus, put what I want down. Overall a lot more comfortable 

with what I was putting out than previously.” Cierra also said, “I got more comfortable 

writing, like you said, ‘look just write.’ You made it more comfortable for us to write. 

36 

 

Because a lot of teachers in my past—I never really had the opportunity to write what 

was on my mind or in my heart. And that’s what’s really made it hard for me to connect 

to the writing.” Cierra’s description in particular brings to mind the work of writing as 

labor that can or cannot be alienated and alienating labor. I saw this in line with the sort 

of work Lindquist does in “Class Affects Classroom Affectations.” My students saw one 

of my goals as “To allow students to ‘own’ the products of their emotional labor, so that 

they may learn from them rather than to exchange them for good grades” (198). 

I think a lack of ownership in emotional labor contributed to students feeling 

emotionally distant from instructors. A common theme among interviews was students 

feeling my class was different simply because I felt emotionally available to my students 

(even as my life outside—and sometimes inside—the classroom was shattering around 

me). Nathaniel described other WRA 101 classes as, “there was not enough comfort 

when you walked into the lecture. Based off of what most people were saying they didn’t 

feel comfortable, and then that just rolled off for the whole semester. They were stressed 

out about stuff.” I wished I would have followed up with Nathaniel as to what he felt like 

teachers should do but at the time I failed to address that. But I think again that 

Lindquist’s writing on “deep acting,” highlights some of these differences. I did not find 

myself able to empathize genuinely with all of my students problems all of the time. 

Sometimes my students made me feel alienated, even, but I still “performed empathy” in 

order “to help them get to the kind of knowledge they now identified as necessary for 

greater understanding of the issues” (204). Only Nathaniel really brought up these 

“issues” during our interviews, specifically naming discussions around the problem of 

Richard Spencer being invited on campus to speak, the previous protests for a Milo 

Yiannopoulos talk, and the racist history of the Spartan Statue. Cierra also said that 

37 

 

“keeping us upbeat to what was going on… got [me] more info and insight on what my 

school’s motives really are.” While Cierra and Nathaniel emphasized an openness in 

feeling like they could discuss these issues, while Shaelynn, who I earlier described as 

the student I was most openly the political opposite in class, felt comfortable saying, “In 

the smaller setting and in this writing class it was nice to know like, you actually like 

wanted to hear our opinions. I expected you to like, spit out information at us.” These 

invitations to hear remind me of Rhodes video essay again, where she describes starting 

her class asking “ask me anything” and ending it with the same question, the first being, 

“Ask me the expert” and the second a radical act of vulnerability, “Ask me, the peer.” I 

don’t believe my students were prepared or expected to make so much contributions to 

the class. 

I believe my students saw two trends in my class that made it stand out to them: the 

first was a willingness to be emotionally invested in their thoughts and ideas, even if I 

didn’t agree with them, and a willingness for them to write and compose on their own 

terms while still engaging with them to consider their relationship to the university. 

 

 

38 

 

CONCLUSION: Affect Aliens And Future Research Trajectories 

In Sara Ahmed’s essay “Happy Objects” she describes how the circulation of 

happiness as social goods is used to build dimensions of social morality of what is 

“good.” “In particular, the essay will explore how the family sustains its place as a 

“happy object” by identifying those who do not reproduce its line as the cause of 

unhappiness. I call such others ‘affect aliens’: feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, and 

melancholic migrants” (30). Ahmed’s essay uses affect aliens to in particular triangulate 

her relationships with the world to push back against the idea that “lack” of happiness is 

a poorly lived life. Happy as good feelings speak to progressive futures where “Bad 

feelings are seen as orientated toward the past, as a kind of stubbornness that ‘stops’ the 

subject from embracing the future” (50). The expression of alienation becomes an 

expression of bad feelings that can keep historical forms of injustice from disappearing 

(50). An affect alien is someone who does not allow social forms of history disappear 

because their very existence puts them in a space of alienation. “Some bodies are 

presumed to be the origin of bad feeling insofar as they disturb the promise of 

happiness, which I would re-describe as the social pressure to maintain signs of ‘getting 

along’” (Ahmed, 39). A common description of a willful student is a disruptive one, 

which, when triangulated with historical oppressions, usually becomes justified in their 

punishment for being disruptive. When Shaelynn described her working class friends as 

disruptive in the hallway, her teacher responded by complaining about working class 

students in general as being “stupid” and disruptive. Happiness for Shaelynn’s class was 

a classroom space the teacher felt in control of, something Rhodes would argue queer 

pedagogues must be willing to get rid of (“The Failure of Queer Pedagogy”). 

39 

 

I would describe much of what my students felt outside of my class, and what they 

expected, was the continuance of alienation without the ability to express bad feelings. 

College and a degree is seen as a social good. As a “happy object,” and a happy object 

when “passed around, is not necessarily the feeling that passes. To share such objects 

(or have a share in such objects) would simply mean you would share an orientation 

toward those objects as being good” (Ahmed, 38-39, emphasis authors). Because an 

education is generally regarded as a happy object, it is difficult to articulate a sense of 

alienation within academy without becoming an “affect alien.” Most of my students, 

while recognizing their college as problematic in certain ways, saw their identities firmly 

rooted within the college. Except for Nathaniel, who at one point during our interview 

said, “Colleges are just corrupt. It’s everywhere. It’s obvious.” I also think that, of all my 

students, Nathaniel impressed upon me as the student who felt most alienated from the 

students in the class. While being willing to be social, there was a judgmental attitude 

towards both students in our class which came up during our interview (he thought I 

was too soft with students and felt not enough of them took attendance seriously 

enough), and in his writing came broader judgements of the students on campus. 

It is difficult to make oneself an affect alien on a campus. College universities invest a 

lot in building community in universities. MSU’s effective “Spartan’s Will” is such an 

affectively impactful phrase that it came up in all the classes I taught as a site of 

interrogation, but it exists alongside all the sites of branding both with physical sites on 

campus, music, clothing, apparel, that it is difficult to not consider oneself a community 

member. I believe part of the reason Nathaniel was so open in his opinions about 

students and the campus is he had literally withdrawn himself from the community. As 

40 

 

he had decided at the end of his first semester to move back to Texas and attend 

university there.  

Nathaniel’s alienation most closely matched my own. An alienation still experienced 

day to day, I entered WRAC and leave it not really feeling associated as part of the MSU 

community. I participated in that community, but from the first week of orientation, 

where I realized several financial realities wouldn’t be met, which suddenly shifted hope 

of taking care of things such as a needed oral surgery (still not done despite being told I 

needed it three years ago, now), immediately made me return to a state of an affect 

alien. I often felt alienated in my own department by administrators, as well. Before the 

summer, I asked the grad director if she would be willing to fund a dinner for the MA 

students when the new cohort got into town so they would have the opportunity to meet 

each other. My rationale for this was simple: peer mentorship and support couldn’t fully 

be taken advantage of without an opportunity for students to safely interact with each 

other outside of a work setting, and recently moved in MA students would not have the 

funds to go out to dinner if given the chance. The grad director shot my idea down pretty 

much instantly, so I instead collaborated with my cohort to host a party at my house. 

The current MA cohort is very close, and does weekly dinners together and has for some 

months now. Many of them have gone to thank me for the initial work of meeting and 

socializing each other, and I’m happy I was able to open my house to them to do that. 

But the assumption those resources will be available every cohort to do made me feel as 

if the department did not care for the experiences of Masters Students in the same way 

as PhD students. Even ordering cheap pizza to have in the writing center without grad 

directors or PhD students there would make for an opportunity of meaningful exchange 

for these students. I know it was not provided to my cohort at all, and one member 

41 
 

dropped out because she did not feel socially supported enough to justify staying, and 

the rest of us remained fairly distant from each other for some months before we were 

able to make the bonds needed. 

I mention this personal example here to say these forms alienation come from 

multiple strings. I also believe that the experience of alienation also affects teachers 

(both tenured and non-tenured) in multiple ways as well, and their ability to feel safe 

and free to express that alienation is contingent on structural powers their institution 

forces on them. Administrators, such as deans and high administrators of the college 

also probably experience it, but I don’t particularly care about their feelings, especially 

when those moments of alienation probably come when the students they are charged to 

serve challenge their authority in ways that surprise them. 

This study has been, for me, a means to think through the question of alienation on 

campus. It has answered for me, in some ways, what it means that students might feel 

alienation but not think of it as a problem or a thing to act on (when acting on it is seen 

as acting against a “happy object”). But it also raises questions for me as well that mark 

the opportunity for future research trajectories that I wish to take the time to explore: 

  How can we teach students to be willing affect aliens, willing to stand under 

the sign of disorientation, discomfort, and disidentification in order to be 

more ready as citizens willing to respond to structural and historical 

oppressions colleges reproduced 

  How does the experience of student alienation change overtime? Is it worse in 

the beginning, the middle, the end? Is there a trend to be had, or is it socially, 

culturally, and personally contingent on the person? 

42 

 

  In moments of widespread campus activism, are those moments effective at 

ending alienation? What happens to the sense of alienation when one joins a 

community of affect aliens? 

 
 

 

43 

 

 

 

APPENDICES 

44 

 

APPENDIX A 

 
 
 

 

 

Interview Questions and Release Form 

45 

 

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 

 

What was your expectations for what this class would be? 

When did you find your expectations of the class change? 

What did you know about WRA 101 as a whole when you started? How did you arrive at 

this info? 

What were some moments in your WRA 101 class that you were surprised by? 

What were some moments you found most valuable? 

How would you describe the learning environment of WRA 101 in relation to other 

learning environments?  

How would you explain to a friend what to expect if they were going to be taking WRA 

101, given what you now know and what you’ve experienced? 

What would you describe as my goals for the class? 

 

 

46 

 

Research Participant Information and Consent Form 

 

Explanation of the Research and What you will do  

 

You are being asked to participate in a research study of how student expectations of a 

class shape their experiences of a classroom. Your participation will take the form of 

allowing work written for this class to be collected as data, and potentially participate in 

at least three interviews if you so choose. 

 

Your Right to Participate, Say No, or Withdraw 

 

Participation in this research project is completely voluntary.  You have the right to say 

no. You may change your mind at any time and withdraw. You may choose not to 

answer specific questions or to stop participating at any time. Whether you choose to 

participate or not will have no effect on your grade. 

 

Costs of Study and Compensation 

 

If you agree to participate in the study there will be no cost to you. Your writing will be 

used, but all of your identifying information will be removed should anything be 

published from the result of this study. If you choose to participate in interviews you will 

be asked to dedicate at least three hours of your time, one hour for each interview. It will 

be up to you to find transportation to the interview site, and you will not be 

compensated for the interview. 

47 

 

 

Risks and Benefits 

 

You may find that some questions ask for experiences or information you may not be 

willing to share. You are free not to answer any question, or to stop the interview at any 

time. There may be no direct benefit for you for participating in this interview session, 

though you may come into new understandings of your own experience. This knowledge 

will also go to helping improve the first year writing curriculum by giving instructors a 

better understanding of their students’ needs and expectations. 

 

Confidentiality 

 

Your instructor will not know if you are a participant in the research study until after 

your class is finished and grades for the class have been turned in. This way if you 

choose to participate or choose to opt out, it will not affect your relationship with your 

instructor. 

 

Contacts   

 

The researcher directing this study is Jay McClintick. Her phone number is 405-306-

2100, her email is jemcclintick@gmail.com.  

 

Statement of Consent  

 

48 

 

I have read the above information. If I had questions, I have asked them and received 

answers. I give my consent to participate in this research study.  

 

Name (Print): _________________________________________ 

 

Signature: _________________________________________ 

 

Date:  _____________________________ 

 

 

 

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APPENDIX B 

 
 
 

Link to Classroom Website 

 

 

50 

 

Link to Website: http://msuwra101.weebly.com 
 

 

51 
 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

52 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

 
 
 
 

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. 
 
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd Edition. Routledge, 2004. 
 
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017. 
 
Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects”. The Affect Theory Reader. Edited by Gregg, Melissa, 

and Gregory J. Seigworth. Duke University Press, 2010. 

 
Alexander, Jonathan, and Jacqueline Rhodes. "Queer: An Impossible Subject for 

Composition." Jac, vol. 31, no. 1/2, 2011, pp. 177-206. 

 
Banks, William P. “Written through the Body: Disruptions and ‘Personal’ 

Writing.” College English, vol. 66, no. 1, 2003, pp. 21-40. 

 
Halbritter, Bump, and Julie Lindquist. "Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing 

Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship." College English, vol. 75, no. 2, 
2012, pp. 171-198. 

 
Lindquist, Julie. “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations: Working through the Paradoxes 

of Strategic Empathy.” College English, vol. 67, no. 2, 2004, pp. 187-209. 

 
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984. 
 
Monson, Connie, and Jacqueline Rhodes. “Risking Queer: Pedagogy, Performativity, 

and Desire in Writing Classrooms.” Jac, vol. 24, no. 1, 2004, pp. 79-91. 

 
Muñoz, José E. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. vol. 

2., University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 

 
Raúl Sánchez. The Function of Theory in Composition Studies. State University of New 

York Press, 2005. 

 
Rhodes, Jacqueline. “The Failure of Queer Pedagogy.” The Writing Instructor, 2015. 
 
Rhodes, Jacqueline and Jonathan Alexander. Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing 

the Self. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. 

 
Seidman, Irving. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in 

Education and the Social Sciences. 3rd Edition. Teachers College, Columbia 
University, 2006. 

 

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Yergeau, Melanie. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke 

UP, 2017. 

 

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