Affect, Labor, and the Graduate Teaching Assistant: Can Writing Programs Become "Spaces of Hope"?

Those in subordinate positions can and must be taught, especially in school and workplace, that emotional responses (such as anger, rage, or bitterness) are always inappropriate and unjustified personal responses— forms of emotional stupidity, so to speak, if not psychopathology—rather than suppressed social responses to the objective conditions of humiliation wrought by structures of subordination and exploitation. In general, the dominant pedagogy of emotion refuses the expression of anger by subordinates. More importantly, it schools anger to turn inward so as to become silent rage or passive bitterness, where the energy for political action can be derailed in the pathos of the personal. —Lynn Worsham, “Going Postal”