Diffracting the “Mismatch”: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, Schutz’s “Open Casket,” and Posthumanist Subjectivity

Abstract

Amidst school accountability practices and current contestations of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools in the United States, statistics-informed classification systems are deployed to help form school subjects, as individuals get sorted and reclassified in ways that separate them from their “immediate historical situation” (Popkewitz, 1998, p. 26). Against this backdrop, in this chapter the author works to disassemble categorical understandings of difference by problematizing some ways the White woman teacher/Black male student “mismatch” (Grant & Gibson, 2011; Takei & Shouse, 2008) is conceptualized in mainstream education. The author does this by diffracting White/female and Black/male relationalities through a complexly situated work of contemporary visual art and engaging with the ways artistic renderings and re-creations of the oftentimes unstable and provocative entanglements of mismatched subjectivities in schools and society might be interpreted and articulated through posthumanist theoretical lenses. By deploying Haraway’s (1997) and Barad’s (2014b) notions of diffraction as a concept and postqualitative research practice, the author engages with multiple, theoretical and methodological perspectives as a way “to rethink difference/s beyond binary opposition/s” (Kaiser & Thiele, 2014, p. 165).