ABSTRACT
The cold, disinfected ambience of stark spaces, muted colors and stale smells, hallmarks of most educational institutions—the “an-aesthetics” of schools (Pagano 1990, 78–9)—belies the invasive intimacy of the project of schooling. Thronged corridors and classrooms, palpable threats, should more readily remind us that the territory of education is the body, and education territorializes the body. The notion of mind/ing bodies bespeaks most accurately and succinctly how the intersection of knowledge, power, and desire craft identity as the cultural project of schools. Schooling, then, is “a mode of social control” (McLaren 1994, 173), a means by which to produce particular forms of subjectivity and to elicit particular forms of participation in social life. These controls are effected through the management and domestication of desire. The sediment of this project of disciplining desire is visible in our most pronounced and most (seemingly) innocuous practices; this book mines these workings of desire, tracing their textures, effects, and interests.
