‘Who are those boys, and why are they here?’

Education always presupposes a vision of the future in its introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life (Giroux, 2021); while some groups may be legitimated by the processes of schooling and education, this is not the case for all students. As a young, new head of History at an established Melbourne boys’ school, I raised the question of subject matter and curriculum choice at a meeting for faculty heads; the boys had asked me why there were so many subjects focused on war and none studying cultural histories. The other heads chuckled, with one observing, ‘who are those boys, and why are they here?’ It was one of those moments in which my own view of education, and my participation in it as a teacher, was jolted out of its comfort zone. It made clear to me that in that space, those content with studying various world wars were legitimated, and those boys preferring to study Renaissance Italy were deemed a wrong fit for such a school and the lives presupposed by its vision of the future.

Schooling is a historical, social, and political system that shapes and influences the behaviour of individuals (Harber, 2004). The subtle and often unnoticed power relations enacted through schooling and education have long been the subject of critical examination (see for example, Apple, 2018; Ball, 2012; Freire, 1970/1993; Illich, 1976). Practices and processes that have been put under examination—specifically processes of marginalisation—can be understood as violence. Violence is ‘that which increases the distance between the potential and the actual, and that which impedes the decrease of this distance’ (Galtung, 1969, p. 168). Violence inhibits our powers to act. It constrains us into becoming in limited ways. In schools, ostensibly created to increase students’ capacities and potential, aspects of school cultures and ethos can mean certain ways of being and becoming are more valued than others. Schooling is an institution of normalisation, constituting ‘a form of violence that acts upon our subjectivity, our relation to ourselves, and our possibilities of self-recognition’ (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2021, p. 4), a process to form subjects according to desired norms. The normative human against whom all students are universally judged, is ‘male, white, western, heterosexual, middle-class and without “special needs”’ (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2021, p. 6). The further we are located from this idealised human in our own lives and experiences, the more marginalised we risk becoming; the closer we can position ourselves to the norm, the more we become valued.

Yet perhaps because violence is more commonly understood in terms of interpersonal violence—such as the wars and battles my former history students were forced to study—marginalising practices have not always been framed in terms of violence. Violence, however, is more than the direct acts of interpersonal aggression that are so easily recognised; violence, amorphously, shapes and is shaped by cultures, social structures, ideas, and ideologies (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004). It is this violence with which this paper is concerned, specifically, slow violence in an outer-suburban Melbourne secondary school, which I refer to as ‘Suburban’. Slow violence, as a concept, attends to processes that accumulate over time to create situations where ‘conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded’ (Nixon, 2011, p. 3). The concept seeks to transform how we might apprehend ‘delayed destruction’ (p. 2), so that we might better respond towards it. Perhaps my former students were onto something when they recognised the importance of understanding the relations between history and culture.

Slow violences

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is not viewed as violence at all… We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is … incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out at a range of temporal scales. (Nixon, 2011, p. 2)

Slow violence is concerned with incremental processes that inhibit our powers to act over time and how this gradual, and often invisible violence, constrains us. It departs from notions of more commonly recognisable, instantaneously enacted violence, understanding violence in terms of the (delayed) destruction it wreaks. Slow violence is inextricably linked with its conceptual predecessor, structural violence (Galtung, 1969). Structural violence—a concept intended to inform the study of social machineries of oppression—understands violence to be indirect violence systematically exerted in a way that affects those belonging to a certain social group (Farmer, 2004). It has been used to interrogate how dominant modes of allocating education concentrate disadvantage, disproportionately enacting harms against various groups of people, such as Black, working-class, First Nations, and migrant communities (for engagement with the concept see Clark, 2022; for structural violence in operation, see Connell, 2013; Kenway, 2013). Such work emphasises the uneven distribution of resources and subsequent effects on various social groups. In attending to matters of accumulation, ‘delayed destruction’ and ‘accretion’, slow violence is also concerned with spatial and temporal questions of how violence differentially affects people, groups, and communities.

However, while a conceptual descendant, slow violence is understood by Nixon (2011) as being more dynamic and capacious, and less static than structural violence:

[S]tructural violence is a theory that entails rethinking different notions of causation and agency with respect to violent effects. Slow violence, by contrast, might well include forms of structural violence, but has a wider descriptive range in calling attention, not simply to questions of agency, but to broader, more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted slowly over time. (p. 11)

Nixon’s expanded conceptualisation enables engagement not only with specific social groups, but also with the spatial, temporal, material, and affective relations of violence. This creates space for considering how we affect and are affected by the social and cultural, as well as the non-human, and for understanding amorphous, complex relations of violence that are as yet unknown. Thinking with slow violence means starting with how violence is enacted, and its effects, rather than focusing on specific groups of people, although it may accrete more for some people, than others.

Normative violence is concerned with violence enacted by norms, specifically within the formation of subjectivity (Chambers & Carver, 2008). Emerging from the queer and feminist philosophical work of Judith Butler, it is connected to the concept of performativity. Performativity takes gender and sexuality to be a reiterative practice ‘by which discourse produces the effects it names’ (p. xii). Norms around gender and sexuality act to establish (or disestablish) ‘certain kinds of subjects not only in the past but in a way that is reiterated through time’ (Butler, 2007, p. 182). Here, Butler accounts for the complexity and relationality of the world we exist within, in which discourse is always historically situated, ‘complex and convergent chains in which “effects” are vectors of power’ (p. 139). As Butler explains:

I do not arrive in the world separate from a set of norms that are lying in wait for me, already orchestrating my gender, race, and status, working on me, even as a pure potential, prior to my first wail. So norms, conventions, institutional forms of power, are already acting prior to any action I may undertake, prior to there being an “I” who thinks itself from time to time as the seat or source of its own action (Butler, 2015, p. 6).

Norms can enact violence by restricting and constraining subjects from realising their potential, that is, constraining them into becoming in ways expressed through hegemonic norms. Normative violence is concerned with how we always exist in relation with norms, conventions, and institutional forms of power, and with the violent policing done to subjects who would deviate from taken-for-granted norms that can force us into constrained subjectivities and certain normative ways of living and being (Butler, 1990/2006). For subjectivities in schools, there is much that is taken for granted about what students should be, as well as means to ensure they are ‘violently policed’. Indeed this sometimes pertains to gender (Saltmarsh, 2008; Wolfe, 2021) and/or sexuality (Rawlings, 2017; Ringrose & Renold, 2010), but also other aspects of subjectivity such as race and Whiteness (Chadderton, 2018; Youdell, 2006), or being a ‘good’ student (Rasmussen & Harwood, 2003), and also extending to teachers (Ball, 2003; Mulcahy, 2011), or schools (Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004).

Butler’s body of work, however, does not end with norms, or normative violence; if subjectivity is enacted performatively as a reiterative practice, we also have capacity to enact subjectivity differently. An ethics of ‘nonviolence’ takes as its task ‘to find ways of living or acting in [the] world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate the world and offer no way out’ (Butler, 2020, p. 10). According to Butler (2007), ‘nonviolence as an ethical call could not be understood if it were not for the violence that persists in the making and sustaining of the subject’ (p. 185); it is through engaging relationally with violence that an ethics of nonviolence becomes possible.

The task is to think of being acted on and acting as simultaneous, and not only as a sequence. Perhaps it is a repeated predicament: to be given over to a world in which one is formed even as one acts or seeks to bring something new into being. (Butler, 2015, p. 6)

Nonviolence, argues Butler (2007), is enacted through struggle, obligation, and difficulty. ‘It is precisely because—or, rather, when—one is mired in violence that the struggle exists and that the possibility for nonviolence emerges within the terms of that struggle’ (Butler, 2007, p. 185). This is why apprehending slow violence matters, so that we can respond towards it with nonviolence, relationally, in situ.

The gap in the research

Normative violence is slowly enacted violence that constrains us into becoming in certain ways, legitimating dominant ideologies, and ways of being and doing. Education scholars of more social, cultural, and philosophical inclinations have long centred practices in schooling and education that can be understood in this way, lifting to view mundane aspects of school life which may not ordinarily be considered violence at all, but that play a part in producing and reproducing particular ideologies. Yet in Education, as I have argued elsewhere (Higham, 2022), the concept of slow violence has yet to be widely taken up. Research into violence in schools has tended towards the more conventional understandings from which Nixon departs—the highly visible, the immediate, and the sensational—including, for example, gun violence and mass shootings, bullying, and harassment. This has meant education practitioners are often faced with narrow definitions of violence which do not fully encompass the subtlety and complexity of its operation in schools, and which fail to acknowledge teachers, schools and schooling practices can also be complicit in enacting violence (Titchiner, 2019).

Earlier education research concerned with slow violence examined the effects of neoliberalism and racial injustice in Black communities in the United States (Aggarwal et al., 2012; Aviles & Heybach, 2017). While important, these issues might be located within existing notions of structural violence. Though the importance of a structural understanding of violence for Education research is crucial, focusing at this scale alone provides an understanding of larger-scale patterns rather than capturing the nuances of day-to-day life; the scales with which structural violence is concerned do not capture the affectivity or dynamism of violence in the same way as other smaller-scale forms of violence (Massumi, 2017). More recently, slow violence has been used to explore the spatiotemporal relations of school bullying (Lohmeyer, 2022).

Affect and slow violence

Slow violence as a concept is capacious and rich, useful in drawing attention to and better understanding such processes of everyday violence in and around schooling. Applying the concept of slow violence ex post facto works as a means for analysing patterns of structural violence in everyday lives, which in existing literature, is often how it is used. However, when applied in situ, the concept offers a point of entry for engaging in immanent critique and ethics—a practice providing agency to those living and working within schools, such as teachers, students, and school leaders. For this reason, the concept of slow violence becomes more powerful when approached through affect theories.

The body is infinite, for Spinoza (1677/1996), capable of connecting with other bodies on the same plane through ‘affects’; ‘affections of the body by which the body’s powers of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ (p. 70). For Spinoza, humans are conceived as part of a dynamic and interconnected whole that is dependent on connections with other bodies and our surroundings, with the human body itself understood as a complex body made up of other bodies—what Gatens (2000) describes as ‘a nexus of variable connections, a multiplicity’ (p. 61). Spinoza (1677/1996) argues we are driven by conatus, the inclination of a thing to ‘persevere in its being’, to continue, to exist, to endure:

Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being… The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing. (p. 75)

In this way conatus is limited or empowered by what is made possible, or not, through those differentially connecting affects. For Spinoza, that which increases a body’s capacity to act is ethical, and unethical where a body’s power of action is decreased, reducing its capacity to act. As I have explained, violence is that which results in increased distance between the actual and potential, and which impedes the decrease of this distance. Violence is enacted through relations that limit capacities for becoming otherwise—we can become only in specific ways enabled by violence—which is antithetical to Spinoza’s conatus. Potential, however, is not the same thing as possibility, ‘[t]he virtual is real but not yet actual, while the possible is actual but not yet real’ (Sellar, 2015, p. 205). The actual is what we might understand as the present, that which we experience, feel, remember, and imagine in any given moment, depending on what we come to encounter in our lives. The potential is felt, but ‘as an ephemeral feeling that escapes clear articulation, and inchoate sense of all that could happen as the conditioning past folds into what will become the actual future’ (Sellar, 2015, pp. 205–206).

However as Truman (2019) cautions, when we ascribe affect to pre-personal sensations, as some affect theorists propose, we can ‘consequently erase identity and appear apolitical’ (para. 9). If we focus only on affects and connections and what they enable in the actual, an important aspect of an immanent ontology, we can risk losing sight of cumulative harms and damage they can inflict over time. Putting the concept of slow violence into conversation with affect provides a way to take up a monist ontology while engaging with the political, as immanently enacted. Understood with affect, violence constrains our capacity to affect, our potential to act. This violence might be actual, taking place here, and now, but it might also be virtual, enacted through memories or imagination to constrain us from becoming otherwise. I attempt this move as the monist ontologies and flattened hierarchies of the feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, and affect theories, do not always work with existing critical approaches towards politics, justice, or ethics, and face criticism for being apolitical, ahistorical, or themselves enacting violence (Jackson, 2013; King, 2017; Truman, 2019). Some experience the corralling forces of violence to a greater degree and in ways that may not always be perceptible in the actual, such as their virtual memories of a troubled past, or their stunted dreams of a limited future.

Engaging with the affective enactment of slow violence engages with cumulative effects of the historical and political, in the present, an important consideration when studying the cumulative and accretive effects of slow violence on conatus, and how we might ethically respond. Real time, in situ attunement to violence in slow motion enables the possibility for its disruption, creating potential for constrained subjects-in-becoming to become otherwise. Advocating a non-essentialist affective solidarity, Hemmings (2012) proposes starting from a position of affective dissonance: ‘in order to know differently we have to feel differently’ (p. 150). For Hemmings, affectively dissonant feelings can produce a politicised impetus to change, to move towards affective solidarity, such as ‘[f]eeling that something is amiss in how one is recognised, feeling an ill fit with social descriptions, feeling undervalued, feeling that same sense in considering others’ (Hemmings, 2012, p. 150). Nonviolence becomes possible through its relations with violence, it is enacted through struggle, obligation, and difficulty. Rather than an ethics predicated on liberal humanist notions of gender or sexuality, Butler (2020) is concerned with that which diminishes or restrains—the constraint of actual becoming, and diminishing affects that act virtually through memory of past constraints, or imagination of them in the future. Ethical acts of nonviolence respond to violence as it is enacted—rather than addressing a pre-determined violence—so that we might check, turn, or ameliorate processes of deterioration, degradation, or destruction as they emerge. Unlike more immediate forms of violence, slow violence presents the opportunity, once apprehended, to confront and address its deleterious effects. In schooling spaces, ‘affect sticks, threads and congeals, forming the “emotional knots”… that may be differentially sensed’ (Mayes et al., 2020, p. 5). When we can perceive where, how, and why slow violence accumulates, and for whom, we can act towards checking, turning, or ameliorating its operation and effects.

Attending to affect

The material examined in this paper comes from fieldwork conducted over 14 weeks in two Melbourne government secondary schools as part of a larger ethnographic study of slow violence for my PhD (Higham, in preparation). I sought to locate slow violence through paying attention to affects limiting conatus—processes causing increased distance between the actual and potential or impeding decrease of this distance—through extended engagement with, and careful observation and interpretation of, everyday school life in situ. Mostly this was done through participating in school life and observing it, taking photographs, chatting informally with and interviewing people, and attempting to initiate conversations as openly as possible by asking what made people feel constrained at school, rather than asking them about aspects of identity or experience. This way I was guided by participants’ experiences of what constrained them, rather than my own pre-existing notions of what I thought might constrain them. Attempting to engage more directly with feelings and spatial relationships, I also devised an online survey in both schools mapping how students and staff felt in different school spaces, prompting them to indicate their feelings for each school space using a range of emojis (Footnote 1). My own affective dissonances and experiences further situate how knowledge of these events and encounters is constructed in relation with affect.

The situation I share below illustrates how slow violence is a useful concept for education. In this vignette, the affective dissonances of queerFootnote 2 students and staff at Suburban School led me to a familiar form of violence—homophobia—and a familiar response to homophobia, a Pride Club. As I lift into view, affective attention to slow violence creates capacity to apprehend other forms of violence that might also be in play besides the noticed and familiar—such as, at Suburban, the slow violence enacted by unintended racialising and classifying normativity—creating capacity to enact an ethic of nonviolence appropriate to the complex situations at hand.

From Pride Club to Stand Out

On my initial visit to Suburban school, I was greeted by a colourful and cheery display.Footnote 3 Prominently situated at the entrance, it consisted of posters proclaiming.

‘THIS IS A DISCRIMINATION FREE ZONE. HOMOPHOBIA AND TRANSPHOBIA WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. K THANKS’ (Minus18, 2012);

‘WE STAND WITH OUR LGBTI MATES’ and

‘IF YOU WANT MORE KINDNESS IN THE WORLD, PUT IT THERE’ (unknown origin).

The posters were surrounded by bright colourful paper chains of people connected by their hands, and photographs of smiling students, teachers, and school leadership, promoting love, kindness and allyship for queer members of the school community. As a first impression, this vibrant visual display created a sense of solidarity, an explicit rejection of homophobia and transphobia posted at the front entrance to the school. Yet as I would come to learn from closeted queer staff at Suburban, the local community was ‘polarised’, and ‘people aren’t specifically mean or nasty, but here, it is difficult to be out’ (fieldnotes, 23 July 2018). Some students were openly queer, proud of their gender and sexual identities, but also recognised that ‘for our school, there is more hate than there is love towards that kind of stuff’ (Matilda). It was within this context that Annie, a teacher, invited me to attend the school’s first Pride Club meeting, explaining queer students were ‘feeling very, very excluded’, particularly throughout the period leading into the Australian Marriage Law postal surveyFootnote 4 the previous year:

We had a lot of discussion last year around equality because the Yes voteFootnote 5 was being discussed, and I had students every day ask me, ‘what are you voting?’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘What’s this equality?’ Or ‘I think it’s okay for two men to be together, but not for two women’. Every day. And I had posters all around my room about equality, so we had discussions about it, but it was... because it was so topical, it was hugely discussed. But there were teachers that said to them, ‘no, I’m voting no’. And they were horrified. They said to me, ‘Annie, how can they teach us, and they feel like that?’ Openly said, we vote no. And that made me sad. I suppose everyone has the right to make their own choice, but the students within that, when they hear things like that clam down, they’re quiet. They don’t know. The students that have spoken to me think they’re afraid.

Annie was attentive to the cumulative slow violence causing her students to be ‘horrified’, ‘clam down’, become ‘quiet’, and feel ‘afraid’, with queer students being told by other teachers they would be voting against marriage equality, and hearing a range of views from their peers. Annie experienced affective dissonance in her own sadness at this situation, which was ultimately transformed into an impetus towards affective solidarity and change. During my first week at Suburban, Annie launched Pride Club with a group of enthusiastic LGBTIQ + Footnote 6students, to create a space of community for queer students, and a space to feel pride in their queer identities. I was invited to attend. The first Pride Club meeting took place in the Wellbeing Centre, a building detached from the main part of the school where students could seek wellbeing support and counselling. Students’ locker locations meant for most, attendance would require walking through the school’s main courtyard at lunchtime to arrive at the intended destination (see Fig. 1), passing the school’s popular and ever-busy canteen area and outdoor picnic tables, where, I was told, the ‘cool kids’ would sit.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Main courtyard space viewed from the Wellbeing Centre towards main buildings. Student lockers, canteen and picnic tables are in the buildings behind the trees at the upper left of the photograph

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Once students arrived, snacks and comfortable couches were made available, and blinds pulled down on windows to create privacy. At the first meeting, we introduced ourselves, which for some included specifying preferred pronouns and sexual identities, intentional departures from heteronormative, gendered social and cultural expectations. The first meeting went well until another teacher, who was not there to attend the meeting, let herself in to look around. Bodies stiffened and conversation came to a halt, students obviously uncomfortable with her presence. I noticed staff react, too, albeit subtly, perhaps to maintain professional courtesy with their colleague or to avoid alarming students further. Once she left people speculated as to her intentions and whether she would report back to other staff who, exactly, was at Pride Club. After this the doors were locked. During the next two meetings, Pride Club attendance dropped sharply from around ten students at the first, to a single student two weeks later (Figs. 2, 3, 4).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Wellbeing Centre, location of Pride Club meeting, including windows where blinds were closed for privacy

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Fig. 3
figure 3

Posters showing the move from Pride Club to Stand Out Club

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Fig. 4
figure 4

The space in the Library where Stand Out Club was held, amidst the cushions

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Whether people were watching the movement of Pride Club attendees in the courtyard or not, the affective climate created by this arrangement constituted a sense of being surveilled. This was intensified when the straight teacher let herself in to observe but not participate, in so doing, constituting attendees as Other, leaving them feeling policed by her conduct, afraid of how their membership of the group would be reported back to those who did not support Pride Club. I asked Matilda about Pride Club during our interview:

If anything, it gives other students more ammunition to have a go. Like I remember, we had an out of school uniform day. And I wore like a Pride badge. Oh, I was the talk of the town, you know? Yeah. Like, ‘oh, look at them meeting out and proud’, and stuff like that. Like, it just gives kids ammunition… I know a lot of other kids, you know, you hear it out in the schoolyard, but um, you know, kids [are] like, ‘oh, that’s so stupid, you know, why would they need a club’, or ‘go look at them go now’ and just other derogatory kind of stuff. But, you know, as a queer student, you’re used to blocking that out, and I think it’s nice that we actually have a community that we can go to, and just, you know, even talk about, ‘oh, did you hear what such and such said about our group’, like, you know, like [Suburban]’s just a toxic place.

In a ‘polarised’ community where there was more ‘hate’ than love ‘towards that kind of stuff’, and a politically charged context where students were already feeling ‘afraid’, Pride Club was not working in the way it had been hoped—evident in students refraining from attending, perhaps to protect themselves from becoming ‘the talk of the town’ in a ‘toxic place’, where ‘it is difficult to be out’.

Further, as a person of colour, I was acutely sensitised to the fact that besides me, Pride Club members were predominantly White, a particular normativity that went unremarked within the club itself. As Suburban teachers and students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds would tell me, such elision was normal at Suburban, a school in Melbourne’s outer suburbs where 82.5% of the community was Australian born, compared to 66.7% nationally.Footnote 7 My own sense of affective dissonance—feeling in part an ‘ill fit’—meant I wondered about other queer people of colour at the school, and their absence from Pride Club. Taking me to the vibrant anti-homophobia display I initially encountered at the front entrance, a participant—who was visibly a person of colour—quietly observed to me that in focusing on specific forms of discrimination, other forms can be missed. As they pointed out to me—another person of visible colour and less visibly queer—the smiling faces in the photographs were all white.⁠ My participant believed messages about eliminating discrimination and promoting diversity might be more credible if these materials were themselves more diverse, not only in relation to gender and sexuality, but also in relation to culture. Following this conversation I asked remaining Pride Club members about diversity within the group, and how it might become a more diverse space.

Returning to Suburban a few weeks later, I found Pride Club had become Stand Out Club. Although the poster promotes Stand Out as being held in the Welfare Centre,Footnote 8 when I attended it was held in the centrally located Library. As I learnt from the map survey and from speaking with students, the Library is the most beloved space in the school, attracting the most positive emoji responses in the survey. Rather than being hidden away behind locked doors and closed blinds in a space where students seek assistance to become well, Stand Out was held in the open, where anybody and everybody can see, in a space where students aggregate because it makes them feel good. Stand Out, whose poster is adorned with a quote attributedFootnote 9 to the author, Dr Seuss: ‘Why fit in when you can stand out?’ was a celebration of difference; it was inclusive, meaning queer allies were welcome too. When I attended there was a larger number overall, compared to Pride Club. A broader range of students attended Stand Out: some openly identified as queer, some did not. Rising from the ashes of what had deteriorated into a meeting with two staff, a researcher and a single student—where the absence of students’ bodies rendered slow violence affectively palpable—attendance now ranged between 10–20 students.

In the search for and creation of safe spaces, argues Rasmussen (2006), essentialising tropes of identity potentially enact their own spatial exclusions by limiting entry to ‘those who conceive of their gender or sexual identity as somehow fundamental’ (pp. 160–161). Spaces such as Pride Club ‘may be nurturing spaces for a little while’, but they ultimately provide an ‘illusion of community based on the “freezing of difference”’ (Fox & Ore, 2010, p. 634). Discourses surrounding such spaces, according to Fox and Ore (2010), ‘fail to acknowledge how our experiences in relation to our sexuality are profoundly connected to our gendered and raced experiences’ (p. 634); reinstituting regulatory forces supporting a white heteronormative order ‘within a normalising gaze of a white, masculinist, middle-class subject’ (p. 631). As Brockenborough (2016) points out, queer of colour (QOC) critique ‘has cast insightful doubts on the liberatory effects of coming out for non-White queer subjects’ (p. 288), meaning that enacting varying degrees of queer invisibility—where queerness may be completely hidden, or, if visible, is not openly acknowledged—can be an agentive practice for some QOCs, particularly those who might prioritise connectedness with families, and racial and cultural communities, more than coming out as queer. The fact there were no people of colour at Pride meetings besides me, and that some queer staff chose to remain ‘in the closet’ in this school, suggests coming out as queer in white working-class communities may not always be a safe or liberatory experience. It seems for some at Suburban, it was more agentive for them to engage in queer invisibility, to avoid having their subjectivities decided for them through attendance at Pride Club. In becoming Stand Out, students who were uncomfortable being outed by attending Pride Club could come to the club as allies, as being open to all means genders and sexualities can remain ambiguous; queer students preferring to remain closeted can do so, while still supporting Suburban’s queer community. This is a similar situation to Cathy’s experience in Cris Mayo’s (2017) research into Gay-Straight Alliances and Associations among Youth in Schools. Cathy found her identity as an Asian-American in a predominantly white high school to be difficult enough representational work without her closeted queerness adding to her stresses. By identifying as an ally, Mayo (2017) explains, Cathy is provided with protection from pressure ‘to fully appear or fully explain who one is’ (p. 90), while enabling her to support gay rights in a group ‘focused on mitigating problems rather than asserting particular subject positions’ (p. 90).

In responding to slow violence enacted through Pride Club, the “freezing of difference” situation was checked in becoming Stand Out, as members were no longer automatically outed as queer by attending. Rather than operating as a group contingent on participants identifying as specific genders or sexualities—a dividing practice ‘producing material and symbolic exclusions of particular individuals from the imaginary realm of safe space’ (Rasmussen, 2006, p. 162)—what was created was a group celebrating uniqueness and difference, opening up space for sustained connections and solidarity premised not in essentialised identities, but in shared experiences of divergence from the norm. Even so, at Suburban people of colour were already a highly visible minority, and I did not encounter other QOC people when I attended Stand Out.

Yet thinking with slow violence enables us to approach complex situations with nuance, including how becoming is constrained in multiple ways. While generally well-received, the move from Pride to Stand Out was not welcomed by everyone. Queer pride was perceived by Matilda as being ‘[put] back in the shadows’:

I would have preferred it to stay as Pride Club because that’s—we’re branding ourselves and we’re letting you guys know that we’re here and yeah, this is Pride Club, this is for our community to stay safe. And I feel personally, that changing it to Stand Out Club, as humble as that was, and it’s not a bad thing, but it’s kind of, I feel like it’s downplaying what we’re about. Like it’s like, ‘oh, we’re inclusive to everyone, we just want to stand out’. Like again, it’s a very cute name and I get the reasonings why and I’m not against it, but it’s just, I feel like we’re putting it back in the shadows. Like this is what we are, get used to it. Kind of now we’re just trying to conform.

For Matilda, Stand Out ‘downplays’ queer identity and its affirmation in favour of a broader, more palatable, ‘conforming’ practice of diversity and inclusion. ‘Beneath its appealing surface’, argues Walton (2011), ‘diversity discourse maintains the status quo of inequality in society. It is akin to enjoying a cup of tea in the middle of a battlefield’ (p. 138). Diversity and inclusion discourses can act as slow violence, decapacitating political agency for marginalised groups. As Callaghan (2018) points out in their study of heterosexism and homophobia in Canadian Catholic schools, broad equity clubs called By Your SIDEFootnote 10 spaces are recommended by Catholic education leaders instead of gay-straight alliances, under the premise that terms such as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are ‘politically charged’. Indeed, the loss of a proudly queer space within a vastly heteronormative one was taken by some openly queer students as an act of silencing and conforming. Ash, a transgender student, wore a scarf over his mouth in protest of being censored; this act is reminiscent of the ‘Day of Silence’, a national student-led day of non-speaking to protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of queer people in schools in the United States. At parent-teacher night a queer parent became angry with Annie, the teacher facilitating the clubs, making her so upset she did not come to work at Suburban the next day. It was a difficult situation, where slow violence was perhaps inevitable. However, through recognising how slow violence works, and for whom, it is possible to respond.

Nonviolence, as an ethics, is based in ‘a response that is quite particular to the situation at hand’ (Todd, 2003, p. 27), rather than ‘solely abstract adherence to ethical rules or principles’ (p. 37). Responding ethically towards violence with nonviolence is not based in upholding pre-existing political ideals, but in addressing shifting social relations. In becoming Stand Out, following Pride, at this school, at this point in time—where ‘it is difficult to be out’—group membership was able to be regrouped from a single student to more sustainable numbers as students’ capacities to attend increased, through their feeling freer to engage in solidarity with the school’s queer community without necessarily being outed themselves. It provided an option based in responding to the emergent needs of that particular situation, rather than furthering a political agenda. Through enabling connections with multiple others and offering a way to live for queer students, whether closeted, or proudly and openly queer—the move to Stand Out apprehended and responded to the unintended slow violence of Pride Club within the Suburban School context.

Conclusion

Violence, as a relation of force and harm, is directed toward some bodies and not others (Ahmed, 2010). While schools and their climates may be unproblematic, or even empowering for some, the same schooling processes and practices day after day, year after year, can be slow violence for others. Slow violence, conceptually, has much to offer, taking in both macro and micro scales of life as it is lived through paying affective attention to everyday violence in whatever form it emerges, as well as considering how it can build up and accumulate into larger scale structural violence over time. In this way slow violence becomes a useful concept for those gesturing towards justice and ethics within what might broadly be described as the feminist new materialisms, particularly those working with affect, through taking in such everyday forms of violence that I discussed earlier, and beyond.

Victorian Department of Education policy regarding LGBTIQ student support compels schools to take reasonable steps to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, and sexuality, requiring them to challenge all forms of homophobia and transphobia to prevent discrimination and bullying (Safe Schools, 2022). Further, in promoting an inclusive school environment, schools should ensure their activities are inclusive ‘and do not have the effect of treating any student adversely because of their sex, gender or sexuality’ (Safe Schools, 2022, para. 4). In following slow violence, the Pride Club vignette lifts to view the complexities at work in such a situation where members of an outer-suburban school community were faced with difficult decisions to make. The drop in attendance at Pride Club revealed the challenges such a group faces when membership is contingent on openly taking up specific sex, gender, or sexuality identities within a predominantly white, working-class, heteronormative space, while Matilda’s and Ash’s responses to Stand Out highlighted the political challenges of such a situation, viewing ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ as putting queer identities back in the shadows, a silencing move back towards heteronormative conformity. This vignette offers a real experience to schools and education practitioners that provides insights into the nuances of slowly working violence, and how it does not always work in ways that are immediately obvious. Examining slow violence is a way to attend explicitly to power in history, the future, and the present, and crucially, to enact a relational and immanent ethics of nonviolence appropriate to such a task.