Hidden Curriculum of Violence: Affect, Power, and Policing the Body

Grounded in two collaborative interpretive studies—one with women in India who were survivors of domestic violence, and another with queer youth and youth of color in the Midwest who were survivors of sexual assault—this paper argues that there is a hidden curriculum of violence. This curriculum of violence can be traced through affective resonances that exist within an assemblage of violence. Powerfully enacted on the bodies of women and girls and their ways of being, these lessons occur across contexts, from the classroom through the communities where they are learned. This is significant because victims/survivors of such violence are often working to exercise their available power within a set of agentic contingencies that reify oppression, making it difficult to surmount normalized aggressions that are ultimately understood as business-as-usual.