Gender remains a key determinant of experience in schools and wider society (United Nations, 2022), however while many young people are redefining genders and sexualities in more fluid ways, secondary schools continue to be prime sites for the regulation of gendered and sexual identities, gendered harassment and sexual violence. The critical lack of inclusive GSD curricula and policies, coupled with cultures of silence in schools, means that underlying structural issues of inequity continue (Ullman & Ferfolja, 2020). In this context, research that investigates and mobilises how young people experience and understand gender in secondary education has never been more pressing. Inspired by innovative arts-based gender and identity research with young people (Renold, 2019; Hickey-Moody, 2019), this research asks how what I’m calling affective filmmaking can be utilised as an emergent arts-based method with young people to explore everyday understandings and experiences of gender in secondary school? Further, it considers how the process of affective filmmaking might offer unique understandings of gender beyond binaries to prompt a re-think of existing narratives and potential futures.

Art making as research method is an affectively and materially engaged process that ‘can support the articulation of difficult experience’ (Renold, Edwards & Huuki, 2020, p. 446). Filmmaking as a participatory arts-based method commonly foregrounds narrative storytelling, even when conceived within a feminist posthuman theoretical framing (Rice & Mündel, 2018). This research proposes affective filmmaking as a process for making-thinking (Manning & Massumi, 2014) with and from sensation and materiality (Hickey-Moody, 2013). Affective filmmaking brings the sensory qualities of cinema (Kennedy, 2002) into relation with felt experience through a process of playful experimentation. Thinking with Barad (2021, p. 133), I suggest that affective filmmaking is a ‘specific material practice[ ] of intra-acting with and as part of [school] world[s]’. This paper performs a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007) of student created video ‘dartaphacts’ (Renold, 2018) through ‘transmaterial walking’ (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Transmaterial walking with student video dartaphacts pays attention to gendered materialities of school structures, spaces and their affects in everyday lived experience. 

This doctoral research is part of the larger Australian Research Council funded study “Gender Matters: Changing Gender Equity Policies and Practices in Australian Secondary Schooling” led by Prof. Susanne Gannon and Prof. Kerry H. Robinson.

Affective filmmaking workshops were designed to support senior secondary students, as non-filmmaker participants, to explore experiences and understandings of gender secondary school through an emergent feeling-making-thinking process. To create conditions for emergence, I developed ‘enabling constraints’ (Manning, 2013, p. 347) as propositions for ‘structured improvisations’ that could ‘focus multiplicity into emergence’ . First, the students tuned in to their affective (or felt in the body) responses to a series of short film clips and identified the cinematic techniques the filmmakers use to achieve these. Students experimented with these techniques in their own making with/from experiences of gender that they chose to explore. iPads in stabiliser grips for filming and editing became extensions of student bodies, allowing them to move freely as they tried stuff out in relation with the materiality of school spaces. The students filmed, edited, reviewed-felt what their work produced and allowed their responses to guide the next iteration, and the next… The student created darta became video dartaphacts with the potential to relay ‘affects and feelings of crafted experience, [to] communicat[e] ‘what matters’ into new places and spaces’ (Renold et al, 2020, p. 446) Diffractive encounters as a method of analysis (Barad, 2014) recognise material objects as phenomena in which meaning is dynamic and relational; what is made possible and what is excluded shifting with each encounter. In this analysis of student video dartaphacts, transmaterial walking operates as a diffraction grating that attends to relational forces of matter and intensity produced in the movement through school spaces with/in the student video dartaphacts. Transmaterial walking shifts our attention away from human embodiment of experience towards relational forces of matter, affect and intensity with trans theories that ‘rupture heteronormative teleological understandings of movement and reproduction (…) to emphasize viral, tentacular, and transversal conceptualizations of difference’ (Springgay & Truman, 2018 #202, p. 6).

Initial analysis of the student created video dartaphacts suggest that affective filmmaking supported students to explore and relay unique felt experience and becomings of gender through their video making and sharing with peers and teachers at the end of the workshop. The workshop process itself generated further conversation about gendered experience and sparked ideas between students that became entangled with their own making and thinking. Diffractive encounters with student video dartaphacts unsettle and rupture normative hierarchies and binaries embedded in school structures (and policies) that welcome some bodies as they destabilise and erase others. Insights into specific sites and experiences resonate beyond in their entanglement with forces of power, policy, and practice.

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