ABSTRACT
This chapter troubles narratives of meritocratic inclusion and of hygienic, humanistic attachments to higher education. By drawing on a queer theorising of meritocracy to challenge and dislodge normative ideas enacted in the global field of affirmative action, the authors trouble subjective positionalities that constitute working-class students’ experiences of affirmative actions. They suggest that these experiences are generated in an assemblage of financialisation, competition, teaching, friendship, and classed and gendered norms of conducts and temporalities that characterise contemporary neoliberal higher education. After problematising the binaries and hegemonic discourses framing affirmative actions, the chapter draws attention to epistemic intimidation, and the micropolitics involved in policing critical knowledge. It positions queer thinking as a strategy that upholds and recovers subjugated knowledges to expose the hierarchical normalities of the field. Drawing on empirical data from Chile, different working-class students’ narratives, the entanglement of epistemic inequality, class, patriarchy, debt, and expulsion with diverse affective experiences that form the visceral economy of merit are charted. While often positioned as radical politics, affirmative action can map on to and reinforce elitism and become part of an exclusionary regime of subjectification that may be counter-productive to achieving equity, democratisation of power, and promoting higher education and knowledge as a social right.
