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Literacy normativities reinforce the colonial, racist, and anti-queer underpinnings of English education, and today these normativities are propelled by the English teacher imagination. To render these normativities visible, this study traces the affective reader responses of an inquiry community of queer educators and reveals normative reading practices that animate how English teachers imagine and feel their classroom worlds. In particular, ordinary affects-those that are subtly felt and often overlooked-spotlight interpretive norms and normative feelings that hide the field's ongoing commitments to colonization, racism, queerphobia, and more. Contributing to Critical English Education (CEE), this article concludes by calling for multiple prisms of interpretation to dismantle literacy normativities in English education and ELA.
In The Dark Fantastic (2019), Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explains that the "cartographies of the imagination" (p. 152) have been "irrevocably inscribed by its victors" (p. 25). Guiding teaching and learning in English language arts (ELA), the teacher imagination is mapped by histories of colonial influence, racism, homophobia, and more. Moreover, these histories shape the stories ELA teachers imagine, tell, and feel in their classrooms and, by extension, delimit the critical potential of English education to challenge normative practices of teaching and learning. Scholars have spotlighted how teacher imaginaries-for example, the "neoliberal multicultural imagination" (Coles, 2019)-shape literacy practices that falsely erase ELA's colonial and white supremacist roots. Normalized to the point of habit, social practices of imagining animate ELA classrooms, and as Nichols and Coleman (2021) propose, affective imaginarles can reveal those normative imaginings and their impact. By connecting affect and imagination, these scholars trace the affective attachments teachers held to imagined classroom types (e.g., authoritarian, democratic, justice-oriented) and demonstrate how these attachments invigorated normative features of teachers' classroom worlds.
Attending to the imagination, affect, and normativities, such work extends recent considerations of teacher emotions and reader response in twenty-first-century ELA instruction as part of the affective turn (Clough, 2010). Scholars have taken a keen interest in the normative emotions and "emotional rules" that structure teachers' and students' responses to literature (Dunn & Johnson, 2020; Thein & Schmidt, 2017). Moreover, high intensity affective states, such as trauma and grief, have been central to this expanding body of scholarship (Dunn & Garcia, 2020; Dutro, 2008, 2019). Less explored, however, are the more ordinary affects (Stewart,...