In the majority of cases, hate crimes are prosecuted at the state levelwith support from the FBI during the investigation.

To put it simply, mass shoot-ings committed by domestic extremists do not fall within the current federal terrorism fra-mework (Carpenter,2018, p. 402). Instead, violence committed by domestic extremists,which involves the death of innocent victims, is generally prosecuted as either homicidesor as hate crimes.

Yet in the case of domestic terrorism, these powers only extend so far.This is because, unlike the FTO list, no such list exists for domestic terrorist groups andnor do any right-wing violent extremist groups appears on the FTO list. As a consequence,18 U.S.C. § 2339B does not apply in cases of domestic terrorism.

Indeed, terrorism is not an explicit charge under federal law (Carpenter,2018). Rather,there exists a list of specificoffenses that can constitute the federal crime of terrorism.These

The demarcation between‘international’and‘domestic’terrorism is the result of anumber of historical factors.

The focus of thispaper, however, is on the way terrorism is defined in U.S. federal law as well as the waythe concept is understood and applied within the media. Because of this focus, thepaper will not attempt to resolve these debates.

o examine the way domestic terrorism is defined and enacted in federal law and, indoing so, to highlight the double standards that exist in the prosecution of right-wingextremists in the United States.(2) To examine, through the use of thematic and content analyses, media reporting of twomass shootings–one inspired by extreme right-wing ideology and one a Salafist-Jihadi inspired ideology–in the United States in order to identify whether thesedouble standards are also present within the mass media

racial capitalism

Equally problematic is the propensity of these discussions to reify a heavily mediated form of violence as exemplary of violence, an epistemology that takes for granted a liberal theory of violence as corporeal, weaponized, spectacular, and operative outside (or in opposition to) the law

liberal positivist

As a contribution to the field of critical ethnic studies, this essay suggests that we might complicate our understanding of the relation among race, violence, and civilian life if we insist on a critique of mass shoot-ings as a form of violence articulated through U.S. empire, antiblackness, and the spatial and political economy of late modern racial capitalism.

This essay builds on scholarship that has understood both race and colo-nialism as foundational to modern social formations.6 At the same time, I draw on and advance a materialist conceptualization of race as the histori-cal outcome of a dialectic between race radical movements and a “resistance from above” that seeks to contain and compartmentalize their heterogeneity within liberal nationalist legal and epistemological frameworks.7 In doing so, I put forward a reading of civilian life as the historically contingent pos-sibility of corporeal integrity and flourishing— a fugitive capacity whose always provisional realization is at once the outcome of political struggles past and the potential ground on which future struggles take shape.

By contrast, I argue that actual instances of mass shootings— notwithstanding the racial identity of its victims— operate as privatized forms of sovereign power, the exercise of which under U.S. neoliberalism issues historically from the extralegal right to seize indigenous lands and the police power to criminalize black and anticolonial resistance to dispossession and enclosure.

Looking at it from this view, the implication that the racial violence at Charleston was a particular instance of a supposedly broader phenomenon— the mass shooting of civilians— may have it backwards. If Stewart’s insis-tence that “we” are “killing ourselves” naively imagines a “we” that never was, this essay suggests that the Charleston massacre forces a reckoning with the relation between mass shootings (which have prompted the discur- sive recognition that “we” are “killing ourselves”) and racism (which per-sistently authorizes killing in the name of “ourselves”).

There is one point that everyone is forgetting in the heated debate about Kyoto. America invented environmentalism and still has a high proportion of people who give to environmental charities and believe that taxes should be raised to fight pollution.

Something less than 25% of all Americans have passports and it follows that the American experience of the outside world is extremely limited.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

To speak, I have to besomehow already in communication with the mind I am to addressbefore I start speaking. I can be in touch perhaps through pastrelationships, by an exchange of glances, by an understanding witha third person who has brought me and my interlocutor together,or in any of countless other ways.

To speak, you have to address another or others.

Human communication, verbal and other, differs from the‘medium’ model most basically in that it demands anticipatedfeedback in order to take place at all. In the medium model, themessage is moved from sender-position to receiver-position. In realhuman communication, the sender has to be not only in the senderposition but also in the receiver position before he or she can sendanything.

To say that a great many changes in the psyche and in cultureconnect with the passage from orality to writing is not to makewriting (and/or its sequel, print) the sole cause of all the changes.The connection is not a matter of reductionism but of relationism.The shift from orality to writing intimately interrelates with morepsychic and social developments than we have yet noted.Developments in food production, in trade, in politicalorganization, in religious institutions, in technological skills, ineducational practices, in means of transportation, in familyorganization, and in other areas of human life all play their owndistinctive roles. But most of these developments, and indeed verylikely every one of them, have themselves been affected, often atgreat depth, by the shift from orality to literacy and beyond, asmany of them have in turn affected this shift.

Orality is not an ideal, and never was. To approach it positivelyis not to advocate it as a permanent state for any culture. Literacyopens possibilities to the word and to human existenceunimaginable without writing. Oral cultures today value their oraltraditions and agonize over the loss of these traditions, but I havenever encountered or heard of an oral culture that does not wantto achieve literacy as soon as possible. (Some individuals of coursedo resist literacy, but they are mostly soon lost sight of.) Yetorality is not despicable. It can produce creations beyond thereachof literates, for example, the Odyssey. Nor is orality evercompletely eradicable: reading a text oralizes it. Both orality andthe growth of literacy out of orality are necessary for the evolutionof consciousness.

Given the relative intrinsic opacity of Latin texts, it wasnot surprising that comment on the text should be deflectedsomewhat from the text itself to the author, his psychology, thehistorical background, and all the externals that so annoyedadvocates of the New Criticism.

Just as the deplotted story of the late-print or electronic agebuilds on classical plot and achieves its effect because of a sensethat the plot is masked or missing, so in the same age the bizarrelyhollowedcharacters that represent extreme states of consciousness,as in Kafka, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Pynchon, achieve theireffects because of the contrast felt with their antecedents, the‘round’ characters of the classical novel. Such electronic-agecharacters would be inconceivable had narrative not gone througha ‘round’ character stage.

The story of type characters andthe complex ways they relate written fiction to oral tradition hasnot yet been told.

Writing and print do not entirely do away with the flatcharacter. In accordance with the principle that a new technologyof the word reinforces the old while at the same time transformingit, writing cultures may in fact generate at certain points theepitome of type characters, that is, abstract characters.

but Sophocles’ Oedipus and, even more, Pentheus andAgave and Iphigenia and Orestes in Euripides’ tragedies areincomparably more complex and interiorly anguished than any ofHomer’s characters.

All these developments are inconceivable in primary oralcultures and in fact emerge in a world dominated by writing withits drive toward carefully itemized introspection and elaboratelyworked out analyses of inner states of soul and of their inwardlystructured sequential relationships.

vantgarde literature is now obliged to deplotits narratives or to obscure their plots. But deplotted stories of theelectronic age are not episodic narratives. They are impressionisticand imagistic variations on the plotted stories that preceded them.Narrative plot now permanently bears the mark of writing andtypography. When it structures itself in memories and echoes,suggestive of early primary oral narrative with its heavy reliance onthe unconscious (Peabody 1975), it does so inevitably in a self-conscious, characteristically literate way, as in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

An especially persistent ghost from this world was the itineranthero, whose travels served to string episodes together and whosurvived through medieval romances and even through Cervantes’otherwise unbelievably precocious Don Quixote into Defoe(Robinson Crusoe was a stranded itinerant) and into Fielding’sTom Jones, Smollett’s episodic narratives, and even some ofDickens, such as The Pickwick Papers.

The ancient Greek drama, as has earlier been noted,was the first western verbal art form to be fully controlled bywriting. It was the first—and for centuries the only—genre to havetypically a tight, Freytag-pyramid structure. Paradoxically,although the drama was presented orally, it had been composedbefore presentation as a written text. It is significant that dramaticpresentation lacks a narrative voice. The narrator has buriedhimself completely in the text, disappeared beneath the voices ofhis characters.

We must not forgetthat episodic structure was the natural way to talk out a lengthystory line if only because the experience of real life is more like astring of episodes than it is like a Freytag pyramid. Carefulselectivity produces the tight pyramidal plot, and this selectivity isimplemented as never before by the distance that writingestablishes between expression and real life.

Oral narrative is not greatly concerned with exact sequentialparallelism between the sequence in the narrative and the sequencein extra-narrative referents. Such a parallelism becomes a majorobjective only when the mind interiorizes literacy. It wasprecociously exploited, Peabody points out, by Sappho, and itgives her poems their curious modernity as reports on temporallylived personal experience (1975, p. 221). Of course by Sappho’stime (fl. c. 600 BC) writing was already structuring the Greekpsyche.

This is not much like writing a novel or a poem.Each day’s performance tired Rureke both psychologically andphysically, and after the twelve days he was totally exhausted.

In part explicitly and in part by implication, Peabody brings outa certain incompatibility between linear plot (Freytag’s pyramid)and oral memory, as earlier works were unable to do. He makes itclear that the true ‘thought’ or content of ancient Greek oral eposdwells in the remembered traditional formulaic and stanzaicpatterns rather than in the conscious intentions of the singer toorganize or ‘plot’ narrative in a certain remembered way (1975, pp.172–9). ‘A singer effects, not a transfer of his own intentions, but aconventional realization of traditional thought for his listeners,including himself (1975, p. 176). The singer is not conveying‘information’ in our ordinary sense of ‘a pipeline transfer’ of datafrom singer to listener. Basically, the singer is remembering in acuriously public way—remembering not a memorized text, forthere is no such thing, nor any verbatim succession of words, butthe themes and formulas that he has heard other singers sing. Heremembers these always differently, as rhapsodized or stitchedtogether in his own way on this particular occasion for thisparticular audience. ‘Song is the remembrance of songs sung’(1975, p. 216).

Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s otherwise precocious The Tale of Genji

Whitman’s chart of theorganization of the Iliad (1965) suggests boxes within boxescreated by thematic recurrences, not Freytag’s pyramid

self-consciously to depreciate.

We plan our happenings carefully tobe sure that they are thoroughly spontaneous.

The electronic transformation of verbal expression has bothdeepened the commitment of the word to space initiated by writingand intensified by print and has brought consciousness to a newage of secondary orality.

Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of‘originality’ and ‘creativity’, which set apart an individual workfrom other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning asindependent of outside influence, at least ideally. When in the pastfew decades doctrines of intertextuality arose to counteract theisolationist aesthetics of a romantic print culture, they came as akind of shock. They were all the more disquieting because modernwriters, agonizingly aware of literary history and of the de factointertextuality of their own works, are concerned that they may beproducing nothing really new or fresh at all, that they maybetotally under the ‘influence’ of others’ texts. Harold Bloom’s workThe Anxiety of Influence (1973) treats this modern writer’sanguish. Manuscript cultures had few if any anxieties aboutinfluence to plague them, and oral cultures had virtually none.

By removing words from the world of sound where they hadfirst had their origin in active human interchange and relegatingthem definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploitingvisual space for the management of knowledge, print encouragedhuman beings to think of their own interior conscious andunconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonaland religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that itspossessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.

Typography had made the word into a commodity.

Print was also a major factor in the development of the sense ofpersonal privacy that marks modern society. It produced bookssmaller and more portable than those common in a manuscriptculture, setting the stage psychologically for solo reading in a quietcorner, and eventually for completely silent reading. In manuscriptculture and hence in early print culture, reading had tended to be asocial activity, one person reading to others in a group. As Steiner(1967, p. 383) has suggested, private reading demands a homespacious enough to provide for individual isolation and quiet.(Teachers of children from poverty areas today are acutely awarethat often the major reason for poor performance is that there isnowhere in a crowded house where a boy or girl can studyeffectively.)

as a betrayal of the ‘true’ or ‘pure’ language.

Print produced exhaustive dictionaries and fostered the desire tolegislate for ‘correctness’ in language.

One can list without end additional effects, more or less direct,which print had on the poetic economy or the ‘mentality’ of theWest. Print eventually removed the ancient art of (orally based)rhetoric from the center of academic education. It encouraged andmade possible on a large scale the quantification of knowledge,both through the use of mathematical analysis and through the useof diagrams and charts. Print eventually reduced the appeal oficonography in the managementof knowledge, despite the fact thatthe early ages of print put iconographic illustrations intocirculation as they had never been before. Iconographic figures areakin to the ‘heavy’ or type characters of oral discourse and theyare associated with rhetoric and with the arts of memory that oralmanagement of knowledge needs (Yates 1966)

Hartman (1981, p. 35) has suggested a connection betweenconcrete poetry and Jacques Derrida’s on-going logomachy withthe text. The connection is certainly real and deserves moreattention. Concrete poetry plays with the dialectic of the wordlocked into space as opposed to the sounded, oral word which cannever be locked into space (every text is pretext), that is, it playswith the absolute limitations of textuality which paradoxicallyreveal the built-in limitations of the spoken word, too. This isDerrida’s terrain, though he moves over it at his own calculatedgait. Concrete poetry is not the product of writing but oftypography, as has been seen. Deconstruction is tied to typographyrather than, as its advocates seem often to assume, merely towriting

Typographic space works not only on the scientific andphilosophic imagination, but also on the literary imagination,which shows some of the complicated ways in which typographicspace is present to the psyche. George Herbert exploitstypographic space to provide meaning in his ‘Easter Wings’ and‘The Altar’, where the lines, of varying lengths, give the poems avisualized shape suggesting wings and an altar respectively. Inmanuscripts, this kind of visual structure would be only marginallyviable. In Tristram Shandy (1760–7), Laurence Sterne usestypographic space with calculated whimsy, including in his bookblank pages, to indicate his unwillingness to treat a subject and toinvite the reader to fill in. Space here is the equivalent of silence.Much later, and with greater sophistication, Stéphane Mallarmédesigns his poem ‘Un Coup de dés’ to be set in varying fonts andsizes of type with the lines scattered calculatingly across the pagesin a kind of typographical free-fall suggesting the chance that rulesa throw of dice (the poem is reproduced and discussed in Bruns1974, pp. 115–38). Mallarmé’s declared objective is to ‘avoidnarrative’ and ‘space out’ the reading of the poem so that the page,with its typographic spaces, not the line, is the unit of verse.E.E.Cummings’s untitled Poem No. 276 (1968) about thegrasshopper disintegrates the words of its text and scatters themunevenly about the page until at last letters come together in thefinal word ‘grasshopper’—all this to suggest the erratic andopticallydizzying flight of a grasshopper until he finallyreassembles himself straightforwardly on the blade of grass beforeus. White space is so integral to Cummings’s poem that it is utterlyimpossible to read the poem aloud. The sounds cued in by theletters have to be present in the imagination but their presence isnot simply auditory: it interacts with the visually andkinesthetically perceived space around them.

The new noetic world opened by exactly repeatable visualstatement and correspondingly exact verbal description of physicalreality affected not just science but literature as well. No pre-Romantic prose provides the circumstantial description oflandscape found in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s notebooks (1937)and no pre-Romantic poetry proceeds with the close, meticulous,clinical attention to natural phenomena found, for example, inHopkins’s description of a plunging brook in Inversnaid. As muchas Darwin’s evolutionary biology or Michelson’s physics this kindof poetry grows out of the world of print.

Eisenstein (1979, p. 64) suggests how difficult it is today toimagine earlier cultures where relatively few persons had ever seena physically accurate picture of anything.

Once print has been fairly well interiorized, a book was sensed as akind of object which ‘contained’ information, scientific, fictionalor other, rather than, as earlier, a recorded utterance

‘Hic habes, carissime lector, librum quemscripset quidam de....’ (Here you have, dear reader, a book whichso-and-so wrote about....) The oral heritage is at work here, for,although oral cultures of course have ways of referring to storiesor other traditional recitations (the stories of the Wars of Troy, theMwindo stories, and so on), label-like titles as such are not veryoperational in oral cultures: Homer would hardly have begun arecitation of episodes from the Iliad by announcing ‘The Iliad’.

formulary equipment to the text, the indexer of 400 years agosimply noted on what pages in the text one or another locus wasexploited, listing there the locus and the corresponding pages inthe index locorum. The loci had originally been thought of as,vaguely, ‘places’ in the mind where ideas were stored. In theprinted book, these vague psychic ‘places’ became quite physicallyand visibly localized. A new noetic world was shaping up, spatiallyorganized.

or, rather, by first sound:for example, in a Latin work published as late as 1506 in Rome,since in Italian and Latin as spoken by Italian-speakers the letter his not pronounced, ‘Halyzones’ is listed under a (discussed in Ong1977, pp. 169–72). Here even visual retrieval functions aurally.loannes Ravisius Textor’s Specimen epithetorum (Paris, 1518),alphabetizes ‘Apollo’ before all other entries under a, becauseTextor considers it fitting that in a work concerned with poetry, thegod of poetry should get top billing.Clearly, even in a printedalphabetic index, visual retrieval was given low priority. Thepersonalized, oral world still could overrule processing words asthings

and in the use of abstract typographic space tointeract geometrically with printed words in a line of developmentthat runs from Ramism to concrete poetry and to Derrida’slogomachy with the (printed, typically, not simply written) text.

Print situates words inspace more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moveswords from the sound world to a world of visual space, but printlocks words into position in this space. Control of position iseverything in print.

Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, itwas print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, withit, poetic activity

Print suggests that words are things farmore than writing ever did.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) andUnderstanding Media (1964) Marshall McLuhan has calledattention to many of the subtler ways print has affectedconsciousness, as George Steiner has also done in Language andSilence (1967) and as I have undertaken to do elsewhere (Ong1958b; 1967b; 1971; 1977). These subtler effects of print onconsciousness, rather than readily observable social effects,concern us particularly here.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979)

The three Rs—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—representing an essentially nonrhetorical, bookish, commercialand domestic education, gradually took over from the traditionalorally grounded, heroic, agonistic education that had generallyprepared young men in the past for teaching and professional,ecclesiastical, or political public service. In the process, as rhetoricand Latin went out, women entered more and more intoacademia, which also became more and more commerciallyoriented (Ong 1967b, pp. 241–55)

Nothing shows more convincingly than thisdisappearance of chirographically controlled language how writingis losing its earlier power monopoly (though not its importance) intoday’s world

LearnedLatin was a striking exemplification of the power of writing forisolating discourse and of the unparalleled productivity of suchisolation. Writing, as has earlier been seen, serves to separate anddistance the knower and the known and thus to establishobjectivity. It has been suggested (Ong 1977, pp. 24–9) thatLearned Latin effects even greater objectivity by establishingknowledge in a medium insulated from the emotion-chargeddepths of one’s mother tongue, thus reducing interference from thehuman lifeworld and making possible the exquisitely abstractworld of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematicalmodern science which followed on the scholastic experience.Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would havegot under way with greater difficulty, if it had got under way atall. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers andscientists through the time of Sir Isaac Newton commonly bothwrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin.

Of the millions who spoke itfor the next 1400 years, every one was able also to write it. Therewere no purely oral users. But chirographic control of LearnedLatin did not preclude its alliance with orality. Paradoxically, thetextuality that kept Latin rooted in classical antiquity thereby keptit rooted also in orality, for the classical ideal of education hadbeen to produce not the effective writer but the rh etor,the orator,the public speaker. The grammar of Learned Latin came from thisold oral world. So did its basic vocabulary, although, like alllanguages actually in use, it incorporated thousands of new wordsover the centuries.

Because of its base in academia, which was totally male—withexceptions so utterly rare as to be quite negligible—Learned Latinhad another feature in common with rhetoric besides its classicalprovenance. For well over a thousand years, it was sex-linked, alanguage written and spoken only by males, learned outside thehome in a tribal setting which was in effect a male puberty ritesetting, complete with physical punishment and other kinds ofdeliberately imposed hardships (Ong 1971, pp. 113–41; 1981, pp.119–48). It had no direct connection with anyone’s unconscious ofthe sort that mother tongues, learned in infancy, always have.

Latin had undergone asound-sight split.

Once a mother tongue, Latin thus became aschool language only, spoken not only in the classroom but also, inprinciple if far from always in fact, everywhere else on the schoolpremises.

Into the nineteenth century most literary style throughout theWest was formed by academic rhetoric, in one way or another,with one notable exception: the literary style of female authors. Ofthe females who became published writers, as many did from the1600s on, almost none had any such training. In medieval timesand after, the education of girls was often intensive and producedeffective managers of households, of sometimes fifty to eightypersons, which were often sizable businesses (Markham 1675, TheEnglish House-Wife), but this education was not acquired inacademic institutions, which taught rhetoric and all other subjectsin Latin. When they began to enter schools in some numbersduring the seventeenth century, girls entered not the mainline Latinschools but the newer vernacular schools. These were practicallyoriented, for commerce and domestic affairs, whereas the olderschools with Latin-based instruction were for those aspiring to beclergy, lawyers, physicians, diplomats, and other public servants.Women writers were no doubt influenced by works that they hadread emanating from the Latin-based, academic, rhetoricaltradition, but they themselves normally expressed themselves in adifferent, far less oratorical voice, which had a great deal to dowith the rise of the novel.

Poetry itself was oftenassimilated to epideictic oratory, and was considered to beconcerned basically with praise or blame (as much oral, and evenwritten, poetry is even today).

The development of the vastrhetorical tradition was distinctive of the West and was related,whether as cause or effect or both, to the tendency among theGreeks and their cultural epigoni to maximize oppositions, in themental as in the extramental world: this by contrast with Indiansand Chinese, who pro grammatically minimized them (Lloyd1966; Oliver 1971).

Rhetoric retained much of the old oral feeling for thought andexpression as basically agonistic and formulaic. This shows clearlyin rhetorical teaching about the ‘places’ (Ong 1967b, pp. 56–87;1971, pp. 147–87; Howell 1956, Index). With its agonisticheritage, rhetorical teaching assumed that the aim of more or lessall discourse was to prove or disprove a point, against someopposition.

The ‘art’ of rhetoric, thoughconcerned with oral speech, was, like other ‘arts’, the product ofwriting.

n the perspectivesworked out by Havelock (1963) it would appear obvious that in avery deep sense the rhetorical tradition represented the old oralworld and the philosophical tradition the new chirographicstructures of thought.

Two special major developments in the West derive from and affectthe interaction of writing and orality. These are academic rhetoricand Learned Latin.

because there is nothing ‘wrong’ with other dialects, it makes nodifference whether or not speakers of another dialect learn thegrapholect, which has resources of a totally different order ofmagnitude.

The lexical richness of grapholects begins with writing, but itsfullness is due to print.

This kind of established written languageHaugen (1966, pp. 50–71) has aptly styled a ‘grapholect’.

one regionaldialectic has developed chirographically beyond all others, foreconomic, political, religious, or other reasons, and has eventuallybecome a national language.

Olson (1977) has shown how orality relegatesmeaning largely to context whereas writing concentrates meaningin language itself.

Of course, once the chirographically initiated feel for precisionand analytic exactitude is interiorized, it can feed back into speech,and does. Although Plato’s thought is couched in dialogue form,its exquisite precision is due to the effects of writing on the noeticprocesses, for the dialogues are in fact written texts. Through achirographically managed text couched in dialogue form, theymove dialectically toward the analytic clarification of issues whichSocrates and Plato had inherited in more ‘totalized’, non-analytic,narratized, oral form.

There is no mimesis here in Aristotle’s sense, exceptironically. Writing is indeed the seedbed of irony, and the longerthe writing (and print) tradition endures, the heavier the ironicgrowth becomes (Ong 1971, pp. 272–302).

The alphabet was used only forunscholarly, practical, vulgarian purposes. ‘Serious’ writerscontinued to use the Chinese character writing in which they hadso laboriously trained themselves. Serious literature was élitist andwanted to be known as élitist. Only in the twentieth century, withthe greater democratization of Korea, did the alphabet achieve itspresent (still less than total) ascendancy.

Sound, as has earlier been explained, exists only when it is goingout of existence. I cannot have all of a word present at once: whenI say ‘existence’, by the time I get to the ‘-tence’, the ‘exis-’ is gone.The alphabet implies that matters are otherwise, that a word is athing, not an event, that it is present all at once, and that it can becut up into little pieces, which can even be written forwards andpronounced backwards: ‘p-a-r-t’ can be pronounced ‘trap’. If youput the word ‘part’ on a sound tape and reverse the tape, you donot get ‘trap’, but a completely different sound, neither ‘part’ nor‘trap’. A picture, say, of a bird does not reduce sound to space, forit represents an object, not a word. It will be the equivalent of anynumber of words, depending on the language used to interpret it:oiseau, uccello, pájaro, Vogel, sae, tori, ‘bird’.

The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of thetext, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visualfixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrectedinto limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number ofliving readers

its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexiveprocess.

The general fear of death, like that of sex, was not the real issue either. Clive Barker confesses his greatest fear has always been "the condition of being flesh and blood. Of minds to madness and flesh to wounding"

Thus, as Romero and King brought death out of the closet in the 1970s, Thanatos found new rituals. As, in the 1980s, the politically correct term for "health" became "wellness," Thanatos returned with a vengeance. The television news, succeeded by reality-based enter-tainment, became a wake—interviews with dying victims of disease, close-ups of distressed relatives, televised executions and fatal motor accidents, reenactments of violent crimes. The horror "boom," led by Stephen King, increasingly performed the funeral ritual of "viewing the body." As a character in King's The Mist explained in 1980, when the machines, technologies, and religious systems fail, "people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving" (136). The zombies and their ilk had become our dying and reviving gods.

red. In addition, the recollection of materiality entails a recognition and reinstallment of this material

I have argued that by means of the teasing play of irresolvable paradoxes constructed in and solicited by the production and consumption of horrific art, the active imagination of the audi- ence is engaged. This engagement effectively grants a certain aes- thetic and reflective distance and at the same time permits the expression and contemplation of the horrific possibilities of human experie

But it seems clear also that the contents and the agents en- gaged in this intellectual game are what get to the heart of what is distinctive about horrific art as well as what generates and sus- tains the widespread popular interest in it

To resituate the pleasures of otherness in the body and to ac- count for the links between the contents and contexts of horrific art, we must attend to the complex pleasures that it affords. This may be accomplished first, by fleshing out Carroll's intellectual thesi

he believes the pleasures in horrific art are largely intellectual

ence to writing. Horrific art inverts this familiar trajectory and violently resituates both its internal and external audiences in their flesh.

However, if horrific art is anything at all, it is without a doubt a species of art designed to close the distance between itself and its audien

gh culture. But the concept powerfully suggests what we want art to do for us. We want art to provoke reflection, and we want that reflection to be more distilled or imaginatively catalyzed than the practical ob- jects of everyday experience. We expect art to call forth an aes- thetic experience that generates contemplative space and often judge the quality of art based on how well it stretches our capac- ity for perceptive reflection through d

Horror art includes those popular classic and contemporary cinematic, textual, aural, and visual forms of art commonly thought of as horrific because they exhibit the monstrous, com- mit violations of the human body, social mores, or intellectual norms, and cause extreme emotions in their audiences. Horrific art may also include those representations, fictive or otherwise, that obsessively express the horrific possibilities of human experi- ence and potentially engender a horrified response on the part of their audiences - such as, films and stories concerned with environmental, personal, medical, legal, or social disaste

in the art work itself; I want also to include certain relational features of art which arise in the space between the art object

that emphasizes body spectacle and movement and move bodies of viewers or readers to similar responses (x). As pornography's purpose is to arouse desire, horror's is to exorcise fear. The pleasure of horror's text, Philip Brophy suggests, is "getting the shit scared out of you" (5). Horror delivers a frisson that originates as a somatic response. The term horror comes from horrere, which refers to the "bristling of the hair on the nape of the neck" (Twitchell 10).

or Poe the "most poetical topic in the whole world" was the death of a beautiful woman ("Philosophy of Composition" 55). The same inspiration was behind the modern slasher film

Horror returns audiences to preliterate, somatic modes of knowing, and movies, television, and rock concerts most completely recreate the experience of the den or campfire. Sitting in the darkened theater, we re-encounter our earliest dreams. The visual and electronic media have been most directly responsible for the contemporary horror phenomenon

The Time cover said that King exploited fear in a way that charged the medium of print and transmitted directly to the body, hence to the visually and electronically literate. Posing as a mass media shaman, he textualized aural, visual, and kinetic sensations, evoked icons from film and television, and narrated in a voice that readers experienced viscerally. If prose fiction was defunct, the Stephen King phenomenon was a long night of the living dead (now entering its third decade). In 1982, Paul Gray had called it, with some justification, "postliterate prose."

You might know splatterpunk under its other names: hardcore horror or extreme horror. In some ways, they’re more descriptive and give you a better idea of what you’re in for. The downside, however, is that they erase the “punk” aspect. Like other literary “punk” subgenres, splatterpunk is a reaction. In this case, it pushes back against traditional horror narratives, which rely on suggestion and implication to instill unease. How? By showing everything.

94 Studies in Popular Culture Weaueworld , horror poetics transform not the beauty of the work of art so much, but instead, people and their sense of personal power. This is truth rhetoric, that which transforms the soul. Stephen King rightly says that the everyday fears we carry around in ourselves are the real material of which horror stories are made. What he does not say so much, however, is how that material is woven in the audience (King). Barker does, in word and literary deed. Horror poetics take daily situations, elevate or lower them to some level of anticipated or actual fright, and then show how characters meet the face of pain or mutilation or death. Readers respond avidly. They want to know how to transform the mundane in themselves and deal with such everyday horrors as routine, their boss or other threatening situations. They want to see them conquered or set right. Daily life anaesthetizes people; horror literature exposes psychic nerves and, through pain of death, revivifies.2 Barker's horror poetics a

point of view. Horror poetics move away from traditional poetics in their perfor- mance aspects. Horror appears to be a kind of magic act. It dons the garb of literature but then takes the reader to a different place and often in a different way than do Hemingway or Baraka. Perhaps it is a matter of emphasis, but horror and even fantasy poetics seem to have a stronger lining of rhetorical persuasion than some other kinds of fiction. The

resent around us. It is in the air as Suzanna finds in Weaveworld , ready to activate. Barker concurs with many like Dewey by showing that poetics are an inescapable fact of life - or should be. R

hand, if indeed it had hands to show" (376). The horror convention - or familiarity - is plain; walking up steps to a hallway with closed doors is a hackneyed tension-inducing device for horror stories. Notice how Barker accomplishes it though; it is nothing trite. First there is Harry's attention to a toothache which lately had not been bothering him. The aching tooth signifies a raise in blood pressure and an aggravating distraction that one might usually moan aloud at noticing. The aching tooth thus signals the tension of remaining concealed while having a bodily function which cries for some audible release which would only reveal their presence. The toothache is immediately followed by a more explosive sort of bodily function. Harry needs to pass gas badly . A toothache in itself would not produce noise, but farting might, especially since Harry's "bowels ached." The tension is building as modeled in Harry's growing discomfort. Finally, Harry is bothered so much by both bodily betrayals - and by having to

her... some freight of hidden feeling which he couldn't unlock" (125). The poetics Barker has Suzanna present through reflection and action include the following factors: familiarity with something through re- peated experience; the child in us as the true audience of that experience, not the adult; familiarity and the evocation of the child as the source of foreknowledge and anticipation for action which gives personal power; and, an inward movement which transforms the self, one's realizations, one's actions. II

ulpted in the tortured, scarred flesh of his torso. These are the babies he bad-mothers, his victims become a part of his poisonous womb. Ho

Freeing ourselves of chirographic andtypographic bias in our understanding of language is probablymore difficult than any of us can imagine, far more difficult, itwould seem, than the ‘deconstruction’ of literature, for this‘deconstruction’ remains a literary activity.

InChristianity, for example, the Bible is read aloud at liturgicalservices. For God is thought of always as ‘speaking’ to humanbeings, not as writing to them.

Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken wordproceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings toone another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken wordforms human beings into close-knit groups. When a speaker isaddressing an audience, the members of the audience normallybecome a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If thespeaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, aseach reader enters into his or her own private reading world, theunity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only whenoral speech begins again. Writing and print isolate. There is nocollective noun or concept for readers corresponding to ‘audience’.The collective ‘readership’—this magazine has a readership of twomillion—is a far-gone abstraction. To think of readers as a unitedgroup, we have to fall back on calling them an ‘audience’, asthough they were in fact listeners. The spoken word forms unitieson a large scale, too: countries with two or more different spokenlanguages are likely to have major problems in establishing ormaintaining national unity, as today in Canada or Belgium ormany developing countries.

In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence onlyin sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptibletext, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, thephenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel forexistence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in whichthe word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. Thecentering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread outbefore me but is all around me) affects man’s sense of the cosmos.For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at itscenter.

They are existentially grounded concepts, basedon experience of one’s own body, which is both inside me (I donot ask you to stop kicking my body but to stop kicking me) andoutside me (I feel myself as in some sense inside my body). Thebody is a frontier between myself and everything else. What wemean by ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ can be conveyed only by referenceto experience of bodiliness.

When I hear, however, I gather soundsimultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center ofmy auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kindof core of sensation and existence. This centering effect of sound iswhat high-fidelity sound reproduction exploits with intensesophistication. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound.There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.

one eventually encounters even the antihero, who,instead of facing up to the foe, constantly turns tail and runsaway, as the protagonist in John Updike’s Rabbit Run. The heroicand marvelous had served a specific function in organizingknowledge in an oral world. With the control of information andmemory brought about by writing and, more intensely, by print,you do not need a hero in the old sense to mobilize knowledge instory form. The situation has nothing to do with a putative ‘loss ofideals’.

Formulary number groupings are likewisemnemonically helpful:

Thesame mnemonic or poetic economy enforces itself still where oralsettings persist in literate cultures, as in the telling of fairy storiesto children:

oral peoples commonly externalize schizoidbehavior where literates interiorize it. Literates often manifesttendencies (loss of contact with environment) by psychicwithdrawal into a dreamworld of their own (schizophrenicdelusional systematization), oral folk commonly manifest theirschizoid tendencies by extreme external confusion, leading often toviolentaction, including mutilation of the self and of others.

riginalityconsists not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting thetraditional materials effectively into each individual, uniquesituation and/or audience.

Comparison of the recordedsongs, however, reveals that, though metrically regular, they werenever sung the same way twice. Basically the same formulas andthemes recurred, but they were stitched together or ‘rhapsodized’differently in each rendition even by the same poet, depending onaudience reaction, the mood of the poet or of the occasion, andother social and psychological factors.

Learning to read and writedisables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind theconcept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interfereswith the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do withtexts but are ‘the remembrance of songs sung’

But direct evidence was available from livingnarrative poets in modern (former) Yugoslavia, a country adjacentto and in part overlapping ancient Greece.

Odysseus is polym tis (clever) not just because he is this kindof character but also because without the epithet polym tis hecould not be readily worked into the meter.

To assume thatoral peoples are essentially unintelligent, that their mentalprocesses are ‘crude’, is the kind of thinking that for centuriesbrought scholars to assume falsely that because the Homericpoems are so skillful, they must be basically written compositions.

One value ofLuria’s work is that it shows that such passing acquaintanceshipwith literate organization of knowledge has, at least so far as hiscases show, no discernible effect on illiterates. Writing has to bepersonally interiorized to affect thinking processes.

Gladwin (1970, p. 219)notes that the Pulawat Islanders in the South Pacific respect theirnavigators, who have to be highly intelligent for their complex anddemanding skill, not because they consider them ‘intelligent’ butquite simply because they are good navigators. Asked what hethought of a new village school principal, a Central Africanresponded to Carrington (1974, p. 61), ‘Let’s watch a little how hedances’. Oral folk assess intelligence not as extrapolated fromcontrived textbook quizzes but as situated in operational contexts.

But lack of familiarity is precisely the point: an oralculture simply does not deal insuch items as geometrical figures,abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes,definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself butfrom text-formed thought.

Iwould add the observation that the syllogism is thus like a text,fixed, boxed-off, isolated. This fact dramatizes the chirographicbase of logic. The riddle belongs in the oral world. To solve ariddle, canniness is needed: one draws on knowledge, often deeplysubconscious, beyond the words themselves in the riddle.

Luria’s experiments with illiterates’ reactions toformally syllogistic and inferential reasoning are particularlyrevealing

Abstract classification was not entirely satisfying.

Oral cultures encourage triumphalism, which inmodern times has regularly tended somewhat to disappear as once-oral societies become more and more literate.

Thepresent imposed its own economy on past remembrances.

direct semantic ratification’,that is, by the real-life situations in which the word is used hereand now. The oral mind is uninterested in definitions (Laura 1976,pp. 48–99). Words acquire their meanings only from their alwaysinsistent actual habitat,which is not, as in a dictionary, simplyother words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facialexpression, and the entire human, existential setting in which thereal, spoken word always occurs. Word meanings comecontinuously out of the present, though past meanings of coursehave shaped the present meaning in many and varied ways, nolonger recognized.

But praise goeswith the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil,virtue and vice, villains and heroes.

ince thedisease or disaster is caused by something, in lieu of physicalcauses the personal malevolence of another human being—amagician, a witch—can be assumed andpersonal hostilities therebyincreased.

Portrayal of grossphysical violence, central to much oral epic and other oral genresand residual through much early literacy, gradually wanes orbecomes peripheral in later literary narrative. It survives inmedieval ballads but is already being spoofed by Thomas Nashe inThe Unfortunate Traveller (1594). As literary narrative movestoward the serious novel, it eventually pulls the focus of actionmore and more to interior crises and away from purely exteriorcrises.

Standard in oral societies across the world,reciprocal name-calling has been fitted with a specific name inlinguistics: flyting (or fliting).

An oral culture hasno vehicle so neutral as a list. In the latter half of the second book,the Iliad presents the famous catalogue of the ships—over fourhundred lines—which compiles the names of Grecian leaders andthe regions they ruled, but in a total context of human action: thenames of persons and places occur as involved in doings

But by taking conservative functionson itself, the text frees the mind of conservative tasks, that is, of itsmemory work, and thus enables the mind to turn itself to newspeculation (Havelock 1963, pp. 254–305). Indeed, the residualorality of a given chirographic culture can be calculated to a degreefrom the mnemonic load it leaves on the mind, that is, from theamount of memorization the culture’s educational proceduresrequire

Writing is of course conservative in its own ways. Shortly after itfirst appeared, it served to freeze legal codes in early Sumeria

Early written texts,through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, are often bloatedwith ‘amplification’, annoyingly redundant by modern standards.Concern with co pia remains intense in western culture so long asthe culture sustains massive oral residue—which is roughly until theage of Romanticism or even beyond.

Not everyonein a large audience understands every word a speaker utters, ifonly because of acoustical problems.

Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is ina profound sense more natural to thought and speech than issparse linearity. Sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech areartificial creations, structured by the technology of writing.

The clichés in political denunciations in many low-technology,developing cultures—enemy of the people, capitalist war-mongers—that strike high literates as mindless are residual formularyessentials of oral thought processes.

In an oral culture, to think through something in nonformulaic,non-patterned, non-mnemonic terms, even if it were possible,would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through,could never be recovered with any effectiveness, as it could be withthe aid of writing.

Chinua Achebe’s novel NoLonger at Ease

Sustainedthought in an oral culture is tied to communication

Such‘things’ are not so readily associated with magic, for they are notactions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamicresurrection

magical potency

All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensoryfield totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite thisway. Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility.Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine something closely byvision, we prefer to have it quiet. We often reduce motion to aseries of still shots the better to see what motion is. There is noequivalent of a still shot for sound. An oscillogram is silent. It liesoutside the sound world.

His cardinal gnomic saying, ‘The medium is themessage’, registered his acute awareness of the importance of theshift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media.Few people have had so stimulating an effect as MarshallMcLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those whodisagreed with him or believed they did.

Jack Goody (1977) hasconvincingly shown how shifts hitherto labeled as shifts frommagic to science, or from the so-called ‘prelogical’ to the more andmore ‘rational’ state of consciousness, or from Lévi-Strauss’s‘savage’ mind to domesticatedthought, can be more economicallyand cogently explained as shifts from orality to various stages ofliteracy.

Inintroducing vowels, the Greeks reached a new level of abstract,analytic, visual coding of the elusive world of sound. Thisachievement presaged and implemented their later abstractintellectual achievements.

Many modern cultures that have known writing for centuriesbut have never fully interiorized it, such as Arabic culture andcertain other Mediterranean cultures (e.g. Greek—Tannen 1980a),rely heavily on formulaic thought and expression still. KahlilGibran has made a career of providing oral formulary products inprint to literate Americans who find novel the proverb-likeutterances that, according to a Lebanese friend of mine, citizens ofBeirut regard as commonplace.

Plato’s own unconscious. For Plato expresses serious reservationsin the Phaedrus and his Seventh Letter about writing, as amechanical, inhuman way of processing knowledge, unresponsiveto questions and destructive of memory, although, as we nowknow, the philosophical thinking Plato fought for dependedentirely on writing. No wonder the implications here resistedsurfacing for so long. The importance of ancient Greek civilizationto all the world was beginning to show in an entirely new light: itmarked the point in human history when deeply interiorizedalphabetic literacy first clashed head-on with orality. And, despitePlato’s uneasiness, at the time neither Plato nor anyone else was orcould be explicitly aware that this was what was going on.

Their language was not a Greek that anyone had everspoken in day-to-day life, but a Greek specially contoured throughuse of poets learning from one another generation aftergeneration. (Traces of a comparable special language are familiareven today, for example, in the peculiar formulas still found in theEnglish used for fairy tales.)

Yet it now began toappear that he had had some kind of phrase book in his head.Careful study of the sort Milman Parry was doing showed that herepeated formula after formula. The meaning of the Greek term‘rhapsodize’, rhaps idein, ‘to stitch song together’ (rhaptein, tostitch; ide, song), became ominous: Homer stitched togetherprefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-lineworker.

Although Wood couldnot explain just how Homer’s mnemonics worked, he does suggestthat the ethos of Homeric verse was popular rather than learned.

Nowhere do thecontrasts between orality and literacy or the blind spots of theunreflective chirographic or typographic mind show in a richercontext.

Despite his new insights into orality,or perhaps because of them, Saussure takes the view that writingsimply represents spoken language in visible form

he Romantic Movement was marked byconcern with the distant past and with folk culture.

‘Write down...sayings.’ Literate persons, from medievalflorilegia collectors to Erasmus (1466–1536) or Vicesimus Knox(1752–1821) and beyond, have continued to put into texts sayingsfrom oral tradition, though it is significant that at least from theMiddle Ages and Erasmus’ age, in western culture at least, mostcollectors culled the ‘sayings’ not directly from spoken utterancebut from other writings.

Writing, moreover, as will be seen later in detail, is aparticularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends toassimilate other things to itself even without the aid of etymologies.

are not here concerned with so-called computer ‘languages’,which resemble human languages (English, Sanskrit, Malayalam,Mandarin Chinese, Twi or Shoshone etc.) in some ways but areforever totally unlike human languages in that they do not growout of the unconscious but directly out of consciousness.Computer language rules (‘grammar’) are stated first andthereafter used. The ‘rules’ of grammar in natural humanlanguages are used first and can be abstracted from usage andstated explicitly in words only with difficulty and never completely.

Milman Parry (1902–35) on the text ofthe Iliad and the Odyssey

whereon reason and the law laying a suitable grip succeed in putting the young man on the right road.

legislators try to excite

that he would make the boy entrusted to his charge pleased with what was good and displeased with what was bad,248 for a higher or nobler aim cannot be proposed in the education fit for a freeborn lad.

He is not mad like this without the god

For as those who are afraid to get drunk do not pour on the ground their wine, but mix it with water, so those who are afraid of the disturbing element in passion do not eradicate passion altogether but temper it.

all existing things

But whenever the mind is by itself and unmoved by passion, the body is in repose and at rest, having no participation or share in the working of the intellect, unless it involve the emotional, or the unreasoning element call it in. So that it is clear that there are two distinct parts of the soul differing from one another in their faculties.

the body.

For how is it possible that the same person can be both better and worse than himself, both master of himself and not master, unless everyone is in some way twofold, having in himself both a better and worse self?

but this one may assume therefrom, that they themselves concede that the unreasoning element is something different from judgement, in that they allow that by it passion becomes greater and more violent, and while they quarrel about the name and word they give up the thing itself to those who maintain that the emotional and unreasoning part of the soul is distinct from the reasoning and judging element.

But in good truth it is evident that there are great differences between passions, according as one is more or less affected by them.

Wherefore they acknowledge, the facts compelling them to do so, that every judgement is not passion, but only that judgement that is provocative of violent and excessive impulse: ad113mitting that judgement and passion in us are something different, as what moves is different from what is moved. Even Chrysippus himself, by his defining in many places endurance and continence to be habits that follow the lead of reason, proves that he is compelled by the facts to admit, that that element in us which follows absolutely is something different from that which follows when persuaded, but resists when not persuaded.

he perceives that his love and affection are increased by reason.

For since236 one may love either a good and excellent child or a bad and vicious one, and be unreasonably angry with one's children or parents, yet in behalf of them show a just anger against enemies or tyrants;

when reason seems opposed to reason, there is no perception of two distinct things, but only of one under different phases, whereas when the unreasoning has a controversy with reason, since there can be no victory or defeat without pain, forthwith they tear the soul in two,235 and make the difference between them apparent.

And so reason gladly inclines to the truth, when it is evident, and abandons error; for in it, and not in passion, lies a willingness to listen to conviction and to change one's opinions on conviction. But the deliberations and judgements and arbitrations of most people as to matters of fact being mixed up with passion, give reason no easy or pleasant access, as she is held fast and incommoded by the unreasonable, which assails her through pleasure, or fear, or pain, or desire.

For in the one case reason is mastered by passion, in the other it does not even make a fight against it, in the one case it opposes its desires even when it follows them, in the other it is their advocate and even leader, in the one case it gladly participates in what is wrong, in the other sorrowfully, in the one case it willingly rushes into what is disgraceful, in the other it abandons the honourable unwillingly.

"The town is full of incense, and at once Resounds with triumph-songs and bitter wailing."228 Such is the state of soul of the continent person owing to his conflicting condition.

Continence

But it is, and is commonly so called, a mean like that in music and harmony. For as in music there is a middle note between the highest and lowest in the scale, which being perfectly in tune avoids the sharpness of the one and the flatness of the other; so virtue, being a motion and power in the unreasoning part of the soul, takes away the remissness and strain, and generally speaking the excess and defect of the appetite, by reducing each of the passions to a state of mean and rectitude.

But prudence, which has to enter into matters full of obscurity and confusion, frequently has to take its chance, and104 to deliberate about things which are uncertain, and, in carrying the deliberation into practice, has to co-operate with the unreasoning element, which comes to its help, and is involved in its decisions, for they need an impetus.

both of these classes, when it considers the former it is scientific and contemplative, when it considers the latter it is deliberative and practical. And prudence is the virtue in the latter case, as knowledge in the former.

Alison’s teaching and her commitment to creating aclassroom where children could be seen and heard;where they could bring their full selves and feel thatthey belonged.

second-graders

These reworked norms allowed chil-dren to enter learning experiences having devel-oped a critical stance; they named,problematized, and interrupted dominant dis-courses supporting heteronormativity and repro-ducing homophobia.

eliberately and purposefully never used boys andgirls as sorting categories or as a way of callingthe attention of her students; instead she usedfriendsto refer to her students. Such interruptionof gender binaries transcended the classroomwalls. Even though the school’s bathrooms werelabeled according to gender, Alison invited stu-dents to“Use the bathroom that most closelyrepresents the gender you identify with. It’s notperfect; I know.”

Instead of labeling the tables as thefive bor-oughs of New York City, according to color, orshape, as is common in New York City schools,allfive tables were labeled with street intersec-tions named for important activists of intersec-tionally minoritized identities (seeFigure 1).The identification of street intersections, includ-ing streets which had been officially renamed byNew York City in honor of intersectionally min-oritized individuals (e.g., East 112th Street wasrenamed Charlie Palmieri Way and East 103rdStreet was renamed Rafael Tufiño Way) providedan entryway for learning about histories often leftout of the official curriculum.

In what follows, we share how the use of thepedagogical third space framework in a second-grade classroom resulted in students coming tounderstand the world in more inclusive ways, devel-oping a commitment to standing up against homo-phobia and normative gender roles as an everydaypractice.

Such exclu-sionary actions risk further marginalizing anddisempowering students who come fromdiverse (read: intersectionally minoritized)backgrounds and who identify as transgender.

Thirdspace is where real and ima-gined realities come together through a“creativerecombination and extension”

As we worked to bridge thetypical disconnect between teaching and teachereducation, we collaboratively developed teach-ing innovations, which centered on, leveraged,and sustained intersectionally minoritized chil-dren’s identities (too often silenced in earlychildhood education) while also enacting highacademic expectations (Ladson-Billings,1995;Souto-Manning & Martell,2016). We did sothrough the codesign and implementation ofped-agogical third spaces

Our willingness to address these tensions may speak to our courage and our commitment to full, rather than conditional, inclusion.

It can be a challenge to create a curriculum that unapologetically includes the diversity of those who represent transgression (perhaps even radical transgression).

These transgressives threaten, or more importantly promise, to open up new possibilities for all youth—which I accept as a core goal of diversity education, and indeed all education