ABSTRACT
Kris Gutierrez: Your work on schooling, identity, and critical pedagogy is noted for its attempt to locate itself in a discussion of larger social contexts of consumer capitalism and identity formation. You are noted for discussing social and cultural issues related to power that exist outside of the classroom as much as you are for dealing with these issues as they inscribe social relations inside the classroom. This is one of the reasons that I find your work interesting and important. The language that you use is often quite literary and is situated in transdisciplinary theoretical terminology where post-structuralism and theories of post colonialism, among other theoretical perspectives, play a significant role. I think, however, that this mixture of the theoretical and, if you will, poetical, has both advantages and disadvantages. While it gives you new angles and perspectives on the production of subjectivity within capitalist social formations, don’t you think it tends to restrict your audience to specialists in the critical social sciences and is less likely to find its way in teacher education courses where I would think that you would want your work to be taken up? Your view of contemporary culture is sometimes considered to be quite pessimisticalthough far from nihilistic-and I wonder if your criticisms of everyday life in the United States are perhaps deliberate attempts at overstatement for the sake of shocking your readers into an awareness of the very serious social problems that face us? For instance, I read some comments by you recently in which you talked about the “structural unconscious” of the United States resembling the minds of serial killers such as Ted Bundy. You write in Thirteen Questions: “Serial killer Ted Bundy has donated his multiple texts of identity to our structural unconscious and we are living them.”1 Is this a motivated exaggeration, a form of theoretical hyperbole for the sake of making a point about the violence that pervades everyday life?
