In this paper, I contend that the tolerance for and presumed necessity of “ordinary” violence within educational spaces can be thought of as monstrous intimacies. Building on Sharpe (2010), I imagine these intimacies as more-than-human sonic entanglements that highlight how the ongoing violent processes of educational subjectification are affectively linked to intimacy as well as the material-discursive codes of the Enlightenment, slavery, and post-slavery. Specifically, I argue that the making of successful literacy learners within this first-grade classroom involved will (Ahmed, 2014), or attempts to immobilize matter as an active vibrational force in order to affirm children as rational, thinking subjects disconnected from the “body of the classroom.” Such will ignored how sounds, bodies, spaces, and “things”—as a collection of affects—extended relationally into children, participated in literacy events, and made children’s bodies vulnerable to monstrous intimacies—particularly boys of color who were often excluded for transmitting willfulness.
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