Media as Sentimental Education: ThePolitical Lessons of HBO’s The LaramieProject and PBS’s Two Towns of JasperJennifer Petersen

The Laramie Project and Two Towns of Jasper were TV movies created in response to

two hate crimes. These movies were distributed as educational texts, with lesson plans

and teaching guides, to K-12 classrooms across the U.S. This essay locates the discursive

and institutional characteristics that allowed the movies to be labeled as educational

texts, fit for classroom use, and evaluates the way these movies were deployed as

pedagogic tools through an analysis of the educational guides that accompanied the

movies. The guides make clear how the movies were deployed as a form of political

education or citizen-production. While the guides state their intent to be the inculcation

of critical citizens, they do so through a strategy of sentimental education that prioritizes

feelings and relations proper to existing neoliberal structures. In this sentimental

commitment to U.S. neoliberalism, with all of its entanglements in systems of racial,

gender, and sexual discrimination, the guides fail their professed critical agendas.

Keywords: Hate crimes; Emotion; Neoliberalism; Tolerance; Educational Media

In 1998, the brutal murders of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard gained national

attention and focused media discourse on hate crimes. Byrd, a 49-year-old black man,

was dragged to death by three young white men in Jasper, Texas. Only four months

later, Shepard, a white, gay college student, was beaten and left to die on the outskirts

of Laramie, Wyoming. Each man was murdered by young, white men, who appeared

to have attacked their victims because of their racial and sexual identities. The

murders and their implications of racism and homophobia raised questions about

citizenship and equality in the contemporary U.S. Media coverage of the murders

spurred discussion on the state of race relations in the U.S., the extent and causes of

homophobia, and the adequacy of the law to redress hate crimes.

Jennifer Petersen is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Correspondence to: Media

Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA. Email: jenp@virginia.edu

ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2009 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/15295030903015054

Critical Studies in Media Communication

Vol. 26, No. 3, August 2009, pp. 255�274

Among the social and cultural responses to these murders and their broadly

discussed implications were two TV movies, Two Towns of Jasper and The Laramie

Project.1 Two Towns of Jasper, an independent documentary aired on PBS’s POV,

followed the reactions of local residents to the murder itself and the trials of the three

young local white men who dragged Byrd to death. The documentary provided a

portrait of a town dealing with its own racial tensions and divisions in the wake of a

traumatic event. The filmmakers’ decision to use racially segregated film crews to

interact with white and black residents (white film crews to film white residents and

black film crews to film black residents, editing together after the fact) highlighted the

sharp contrasts between the ways black and white residents understood the murder

and race relations in Jasper more generally. The Laramie Project, based on a prize-

winning play of the same name, aired as an HBO original movie. Constructed out of

the transcripts of ethnographic interviews with Laramie residents, The Laramie

Project dramatized these interviews as well as the experiences of a New York-based

theater troupe in traveling to Laramie to investigate the aftermath of Shepard’s

murder. Because of their subject matter, both of these programs aired and circulated

as serious social commentaries on the individual murders and hate crimes in general.

In addition, the movies became teaching materials, distributed to K-12 classrooms

across the nation along with lesson plans and teaching guides (educational materials).

In this article I analyze the educational materials distributed alongside the TV

programs. These materials position the programs as educational and provide

instruction on how to read the programs as political education texts. At stake in

the materials and their instruction is the convergence of media and educational

institutions in the project of forming political subjectivities. Above and beyond the

video texts of The Laramie Project and Two Towns of Jasper, these educational

materials are interesting media texts for scholarly evaluation. In addition to

mediating the institutions of PBS and HBO (via managing reputations for quality

and educational programming), they mediate the television programs themselves, in

their explicit training on how to read the programs as primers on citizenship.

The materials themselves position their lessons on citizenship as empowering and

as cultivating active, liberal-democratic citizenship. However, as I will demonstrate,

the lessons actually undermine the capacity structurally to critique political structures

and institutions. The vision of citizenship offered is, upon closer analysis, more

amenable to neoliberal politics than to radical critique. By neoliberalism, I am

referring to a political project that aims to redefine the relationship of government to

citizens, increasingly moving the locus of risk and responsibility away from the state

and onto individuals. Neoliberalism, as a set of political and discursive positions, is

characterized by the idea that the market and quasi-market mechanisms provide

better governance than the institutions of the state (Hindess, 2002; Thorsen & Lie,

2006). Within neoliberalism, principles of individual autonomy, competition, and the

primacy of property rights take precedence over principles of democratic processes

and the need for equity of access to politics and economic life. Both the assumptions

behind neoliberalism and the specific policies enacted in the name of neoliberalism

256 J. Petersen

carry with them implicit normative visions of citizenship and politics; in this way, it is

possible to speak of neoliberal visions of citizenship.

Interestingly, the materials accomplish their political lessons largely via work on

student emotions, or sentimental education. The materials overwhelmingly focus on

student emotions as the venue for engagement, reflection, and action. For instance,

the lesson plans invite students to engage in various activities of identification and

emulation. Activities modeling good citizenship ask students to record who they

identify with the most in the movies, encouraging them to find and identify with

examples of ‘‘tolerance’’ and, conversely, to dis-identify with and disapprove of

‘‘intolerance.’’ Within these educational materials, civic education equals sentimental

education. This use of sentiment to perform citizenship education not only stresses

the role of emotion in political education, but also illustrates the many types of

education that media texts offer. With their emphasis on emotion and citizenship,

these materials present an opportunity for exploring the relationships among

education, emotions, citizenship, and media institutions in the contemporary

context.

In what follows, I explore these relationships. The supplementary materials provide

an example of how media institutions perform political work, here through lessons

on proper political emotions. I show that the particular lessons offered by PBS and

HBO ultimately (re)constitute neoliberal visions of the relationship between citizens,

institutions, and state, by framing racist and sexist behavior as marginal and private

and casting the pursuit of racial and sexual justice within the narrow context of

individual ‘‘tolerance.’’ In performing these lessons, these media institutions are

inculcating political subjectivities that fit and support neoliberal forms of governance.

The purpose of this article, then, is two-fold: (1) to examine how the two programs

became, through the educational materials, tools for teaching citizenship through

emotion; and (2) to link this project of sentimental education to larger political

discourses and structures. In this argument, I do not wish to align sentimental

education in general with neoliberal politics (rather, I hold that it is part of any

political education), but to examine how the particular sentimental lessons offered in

these teaching guides frame citizenship and political agency firmly within the

discourse of neoliberalism. In order to do so, I first outline work on emotion and

political discourse that provides a critical framework for understanding emotion

within public, political discourse. I use this framework and the tools of critical

pedagogy as the basis for my analysis of the deployment of emotion within the

educational materials. I conclude by linking the sentiments and political discourses

promoted within the materials to political structures and institutions.

Sentiment, Politics, and Education

The educational materials distributed with the programs promise to transform

students, to work on their political subjectivity and build good (active) citizens. They

pledge to initiate student reflection on racism and homophobia, and to inspire

actions defined in terms of good citizenship. The teaching guide distributed with

Media as Sentimental Education 257

The Laramie Project aims to transform students into ‘‘citizen-activists willing to stand

up and speak out’’ (Time, 2002a, p. 3). One of the guides distributed with Two Towns

contains a subsection dedicated to ideas for ‘‘taking action’’ within the viewers’ own

communities (Discussion Guide, 2002, p. 6). Particular venues and types of speech are

suggested in which students might do this standing up and speaking out: fund-raising

for organizations that fight prejudice, lobbying politicians, and the creation of

student media. These actions are among those traditionally associated with citizen-

ship. What is particular about these lessons is that they attempt to move students

toward these actions largely through work on student emotion. This particularity

raises interesting theoretical questions. Does the fact that the materials focus on

emotion mean that they de-politicize, removing the events and their implications

from the sphere of politics to that of psychology? Or can exhortations to feel be

analyzed for their specific political and ideological implications?

Following emerging scholarship on public feelings, I opt for the latter, to analyze

critically the political implications of the sentimental education offered in these

teaching texts. Such an analysis relies on several assumptions. The first is that

emotions are, at least in part, public and discursive.2 As scholars such as Sarah

Ahmed (2004) and Barbara Koziak (2000), among others,3 have pointed out,

emotions are taught and learned as well as felt. That is, they are directed by rhetoric,

discourse, and culture as much as by individual psychology and interiority. This

approach departs from those who are suspicious of emotion, seeing it as easily

manipulated or as a way of privatizing public issues. While many scholars and

politicians fear emotional discourse as being more open to manipulation, it is

important to remember that rational argumentation may just as easily hide specific

interests and sentiments. For example, Laurie Ouellette (1999) shows how PBS’s

articulation of public service has traditionally centered upon teaching a rationalist

style of discourse to a public in need of elevation. Ouellette points out that this vision

of public service was actualized as an effort to inculcate bourgeois class, racial, and

gender norms in those of ‘‘lower’’ social class. This is a sort of coercion cloaked in

rational, democratic rhetoric. And, while it is true that invocations of the language of

feeling, character, and morals can work to re-cast issues of public policy as issues of

private interest, calls to feel can also work to invite people into public expressions and

political action of various types (Ahmed, 2004; Cvetkovich, 2003).

The second assumption follows upon the first. Sentimental education, or learning

the range of appropriate social expressions of feeling, is part of all political education

and the formation of citizen-subjects. Barbara Koziak (2000) has pointed out that the

‘‘education’’ of emotions is and has long been part of the purview of politics and

citizen education. Political rhetoric as well as popular drama and narrative teaches us

when and what to feel anger over, who to grieve for and when, and who are the proper

objects of pity, empathy, and care. Learning these ‘‘proper’’ emotions (including the

proper objects for different emotions) is, then, normative and a key part of belonging

to a political community. This designation of proper emotions is, in turn, an

important basis for legitimating any given political regime. The education of feeling

may legitimate oppressive political regimes and educate citizenship proper to

258 J. Petersen

oppressive relations or legitimate and inculcate more egalitarian political regimes,

educating citizens committed to justice and to others. We learn proper emotional

responses to different scenarios through school and the media (as is the case here),

political rhetoric, memorials and museums, holidays, and even the arrangement of

public space. These emotional scenarios structure political participation and

intervention as well as claims on justice (who may make them in what circumstances

and how). For example, within classic liberalism, proper political emotion is

traditionally characterized by dis-interest (Warner, 1991) and/or enlightened self-

interest (Koziak, 2000). In order to be seen as valid, political proposals should be

presented in a language and emotional performance of objective, expert assessment;4

even political projects deeply invested in the economic or political interests of select

individuals or constituencies can be made to seem more justifiable through use of the

language of dis-interest. This performance of dis-interest is key to upholding the

legitimacy of liberal democracies. If the system is only fair so far as it is procedural and

free of undue preferences, then proper performance of this lack of preference (dis-

interest) becomes an important component to demonstrating political legitimacy.

Once we have defined some expressions of emotion as political, then it is possible

to evaluate these expressions of emotion in terms of what political projects they

legitimize. Indeed, Lauren Berlant (2004) has shown how the contemporary rhetoric

and exercise of ‘‘compassion’’ works to shore up relations of hierarchical power,

between the bestower of compassion and the recipient, who must meet cultural

designations of worthy suffering. Sarah Ahmed (2004) has shown how official efforts

to apologize for forced assimilation of Aboriginal peoples in the Australian context

were carefully scripted and managed so as not to implicate the government in

remediation. Both of these analyses look at how a particular set of emotions, in

specific contexts, work to produce subjectivities and actions proper to a specific

political project. For example, in Berlant’s example, compassion works to reproduce

social hierarchies. The discourse of compassion she evaluates distinguishes between

worthy and unworthy objects of compassion: worthy objects of compassion are those

who work within social norms and institutions. However, as others have pointed out,

compassion may also destabilize and surprise. Compassion across divides such as race

and nation may upset these divisions and the social hierarchies they represent

(Cvetkovich, 2003; Davis, 2004). Given the different political possibilities of

emotional discourse, a contextual approach is called for. Rather than outlining the

different political work emotions perform in the abstract, it is more promising to

follow the example of ideological analysis and examine what policies and institutions

exhortations to feel support, and to examine which actions and possibilities these

emotions point us toward.

The fact that the educational materials accompanying The Laramie Project and Two

Towns of Jasper are engaged in the education of a particular set of political emotions,

then, raises questions about the political productivity of their specific lessons on

emotions and citizenship. What emotions are students instructed to have? What

regimes, discourses, and subjectivities do these emotions help produce? What

institutions and policies do they legitimate? If all political education includes

Media as Sentimental Education 259

sentimental education, what makes some lessons critical and some lessons legitimate

hegemonic politics and institutions? Returning to the language of critical pedagogy

put forth in the educational guides themselves, these question can be addressed

through the lens of critical vs. hegemonic pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is centrally

concerned with making structures of power evident and providing students with the

tools they need to make changes in social and economic structures of oppression

(Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1989). Critical pedagogy is, then, in direct and confrontational

opposition to the neoliberal view of education as a practical tool for producing

‘‘skilled’’ members of the workforce and informed consumers. A pedagogy that

inculcates subjectivities proper to the neoliberal vision of citizenship is invested in

producing individuals who can provide labor (and wealth) for industries, who are

skilled in the logic of consumer choice, and who are mobile and ready to assume risks

previously shouldered by the state. Such individuals should be willing to ‘‘take

responsibility for themselves,’’ or view social conditions as the outcome of choices

freely made by individuals and not the result of history or policy. In contrast, critical

pedagogy is invested in producing individuals who have a vision of their world within

a complex social whole or totality and are alert to the connections between different

spheres of life, individuals who can articulate and situate their own experiences in

relations of power and use this as the basis for political decisions and action. This

comparison follows a basis in critical theory that opposes citizens to consumers, those

who act to those who are acted upon. Often, these oppositions focus on rational

reflection as the path toward the ends of critical pedagogy, and oppose rational

reflection to sentiment and spectacle. As Carmen Luke (1992) and Valerie Walkerdine

(1992) have pointed out, this opposition and alignment of critical pedagogy with

rationality contains lessons on proper political subjectivity in itself. The rational and

autonomous student subject favored by these strains of critical pedagogy is defined

through masculinity and Western liberal notions of individualism.

This limitation in the theorization of critical pedagogy can be remedied by Koziak

and others, who ask us to pay attention to the emotional component of any political

rhetoric or practice, including critical pedagogy. What makes critical pedagogy

critical, Giroux suggests, is not its adherence to a particular set of strategies and texts

so much as its efforts to make the classroom part of a radical democratic project

(Giroux, 1989). I am not, it should be clear, drawing an opposition between

sentiment and rationality, but between different lines of emotional and intellectual

training. All ‘‘habits, relations, meanings, desires, representations, and self-images’’

(Giroux, 1989, p. 142) are constructed through power and hierarchical constructions

of race, class, gender, and sexuality and thus are objects of critical pedagogy.

Emotions and desire are, after all, key in both the formation of subjectivity and in

the motivation toward action. They frame and give moral texture to facts, and

determine their relative importance and actionability.5 In fact, the way that emotions

are inculcated and educated may be part of what constitutes the divide between

critical pedagogy and hegemonic pedagogy. Education that aligns student emotions

and subjectivities with systems of hegemonic systems of privilege, production, and

exclusion is hegemonic, regardless of whether it uses mostly reason to educate. The

260 J. Petersen

reverse is also true. Education that orients emotions against systems of hierarchy and

oppression is critical pedagogy. The issue or problem with the educational materials

is not so much the use of sentiment itself as an educational tool as it is the specific

sentimental education (what to feel, and for whom) offered by the materials. The key

question in evaluating the educational materials is, then, how the materials counsel

good and bad feelings, and how this counsel translates into a political vision or

project, what relations of power it legitimizes, and what programs of action it enables.

Often, the emotional content of political rhetoric or education is buried beneath

the surface (see Luke, 1992; Walkerdine, 1992), an implicit curriculum whose

uncovering requires close scrutiny. However, in the lesson plans I examine here, the

tasks of emotional emotion is front and center. The use of emotion within political

education in these guides is an evident target of analysis. My question about these

lesson plans is whether their work on emotions is in line with the critical pedagogic

project they promise. In other words, do they work to support the production of

radical democratic citizenship, or do they work to produce citizens within the

neoliberal mold?

The Education of Neoliberal Sentiment

The educational materials distributed with Two Towns of Jasper and The Laramie

Project present the programs as educational texts for building citizenship. The TV

programs these materials accompany both document murders in small towns, and

explore the social problems these murders came to highlight. The programs were

originally aired on PBS (Two Towns) and HBO (The Laramie Project); their secondary

distribution to K-12 classrooms was accompanied by a variety of supplementary

educational texts, including lesson plans for students and teacher guides, also created

and distributed by PBS and HBO, both as print materials and online (on the

channels’ respective websites). For both PBS and HBO, this secondary distribution

was a way of positioning their content as socially valuable*‘‘quality’’ or educational

TV*and providing avenues to scholastic audiences (or markets). Along with the a

copy of The Laramie Project, HBO distributed to K-12 classrooms a student guide,

directing discussion of the movie and offering extension activities for students, and a

teachers’ guide, justifying why it is important to teach the movie. Considered in

economic and institutional terms, these educational materials are a prime example of

synergy applied to the classroom. The materials pull together different sources of

Time Warner content (Time magazine coverage and the HBO movie) in one

comprehensive guide, using the venue of the classroom to present Time Warner

content as an authoritative source to young, potential audiences. Time magazine

regularly packages and distributes teaching guides using magazine content; in this

case HBO and Tolerance.org were also partners in the development of the guides.6

Similarly, PBS regularly distributes classroom materials with its POV documentaries,

and Two Towns is no aberration. For PBS, such lesson plans are part of the packaging

and approach that brands PBS as providing both serious content and a public service

(here, education). PBS’s social and regulatory distinction relies upon a special

Media as Sentimental Education 261

relationship to public service: one that defines itself in opposition to popular

entertainment. This distinction is maintained through mechanisms such as a

subdued aesthetic, programming labeled as educational and culturally elevating,

and high-brow cultural affiliations (Murray, 2004; Ouellette & Lewis, 2000);

educational materials such as those distributed with Two Towns are both a service

to the public and a mechanism for this distinction. To go along with Two Towns,

PBS.org offers two lesson plans, ‘‘Examining Prejudice’’ and ‘‘Examining White

Privilege,’’ geared toward K-12 classrooms. These lesson plans are designed to meet

national social studies curricular standards. The PBS website also includes a

discussion guide designed for use in either classroom or community settings. The

discussion guide, which is aimed at promoting discussion of and solutions to racial

conflicts in the viewers’ communities, was put together by Active Voice, a third-party

non-profit group aimed at developing community-organizing campaigns.7

These materials come together to offer explicit instruction on how to feel about the

programs and, in doing so, instruct in good citizenship. What constitutes a good

citizen is implicitly defined through the activities contained in the lesson plans. These

activities, and the forms of political subjectivity that they encourage, in the end

undermine the critical promise of the educational materials. Ultimately, the emotions

that a good citizen should have in these lessons are ones that support neoliberal

politics and definitions of social issues. The alignment of emotion with neoliberal

projects is evident in the ways that the materials define their objects of study, prejudice

and intolerance, as breaks with dominant political ideals; in the way the materials set

specific examples of good citizenship through exercises of identification and dis-

identification; and, finally, in the ameliorative strategies used in the definition and

teaching of white privilege. The guides explicitly place emotional responses within

normative discourses on citizenship, proposing a template for good and bad civic

feeling that emphasizes the interpersonal over the historical or structural, locates

individual behavior and choices as the site for the remediation of racial and sexual

injustice, and reinscribes a limited notion of individual ethics based on intentionality.

The educational materials re-stage the murders of these two men as very particular

types of events, aberrations from the American political system. In The Laramie

Project teaching guide, for example, the murder of Matthew Shepard (and other acts

of violence profiled in the guide) is presented both as extraordinary and as a violation

of the social contract. The guide locates the murder of Matthew Shepard within a

context of other notable murders and evidence of prejudice in recent American

history: the murder of James Byrd Jr., the internment of Japanese-Americans during

WWII, the shooting rampage of Buford Furrow in a Southern California Jewish

Community Center, the rise of hate groups on the internet, the Columbine school

shootings, and post 9/11 attacks against Muslim Americans and others perceived by

their attackers to be Muslim. Within the logic of the guides, the offense of these

examples of violence is to national ideals; examining them will help ‘‘illuminate the

causes of bigotry*as well as [demonstrate] steps individual citizens can take to help

America live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all’’ (Time, 2002b, p. 6). The

proper remediation is, notably, a restoration of national ideals. This framing offers

262 J. Petersen

instructions on how and why to grieve for Matthew Shepard, teaching students the

proper dispositions, emotions, and subjectivities of good citizenship. In doing so, it

also re-articulates the event of Matthew Shepard’s death as an aberration within

liberalism (and hence correctable within the system), rather than suggesting that the

type of violence visited upon Matthew Shepard might have any origins in or links to

the system and laws that we inhabit.8

This limited construction of heteronormativity is echoed in the way homophobia

and racism are defined in the lesson plans. The language of sentiment in which

students are instructed frames racism, homophobia, and justice in particular ways.

The language of the lesson plans deal in the language of personal taste and choice:

students are instructed to watch and be mindful of feelings of ‘‘prejudice’’ and ‘‘bias.’’

While the program Two Towns is presented in terms of race and racism, the PBS

classroom guide deals with ‘‘Exploring Prejudice.’’ The test that students take to

measure the way they inhabit discourses of racism is termed a ‘‘hidden bias’’ test. The

language of bias not only frames the issue of racism in terms of intention, but also

suggests an unbiased point of view as norm. In critical pedagogy, the personal is often

used to uncover systems of inequality. Rather than connect the personal to larger

systems of inequality, the PBS lesson plans are careful to maintain distance, and not

to implicate the students’ personal experiences and identities in systems of racism

and homophobia. The closer the material gets to students, the more the language

retreats from the potentially confrontational terminology of inequality and injustice,

moving from racism to hidden bias. Similarly, in the teaching guide for The Laramie

Project, the language progresses from hate toward the more sanitized prejudice and

intolerance. This move away from confrontational language suggests a concern not to

implicate students’ sense of self in larger political and social concerns: the language of

hidden bias does not indict, and allows for distance, in a way that the language of

hidden racist assumptions or hate does not. This move is also a move from the

language of structure to that of choice. The teaching guide and lesson plans that

accompany The Laramie Project present Matthew Shepard’s murder as a symptom of

a larger social ill, alternately homophobia and a more general idea of ‘‘intolerance,’’

used as an umbrella term within the student and teacher guides to cover racial

prejudice, state-sponsored xenophobia, and arguably hegemonic articulations of

homophobia. The language used, the feelings encouraged, and the targets of those

feelings (the self and immediately surrounding others) are interpersonal rather than

structural. Students are not asked to feel anger, indignation, or responsibility toward

policies or organizations with unfair or unjust rules or procedures (such as

exclusionary organizations) but to avoid enacting or being complicit in such policies.

Such work on the self is important; however, this focus threatens to cast issues of

racism, homophobia, and injustice in general within the frame of interpersonal

relations and intentionality. The effect is to reproduce limited notions of individual

agency, contained within intentionality. That is, individuals bear no responsibility for

the structures that produced them, their subjectivities, and their privileges, as they are

outside of individual intentionality. The lesson produced is that combating racism

Media as Sentimental Education 263

and homophobia is equal to monitoring and policing motives and behaviors. The

domain of racial justice is here drawn as individual behavior and intention.

This focus on the interpersonal can be traced into the central sentimental lesson on

proper citizenship found within the lesson plans, which is one of tolerance. Tolerance

as a particular set of emotions, dispositions, and behaviors proper to citizenship is a

recurring theme in the lessons; it exists as a norm to aspire to in exercises on seeking

out hidden bias to exercises in identification. The teaching materials for both

programs ask students to find examples of good and bad dispositions and behavior in

the movies, to seek points of identification and dis-identification, and to log

emotional responses to the programs. For both The Laramie Project and Two Towns,

one of the first tasks viewers are asked to complete is to record, summarize, and

discuss their emotions. The teacher’s guide for The Laramie Project prompts teachers

to ask students to record answers to questions such as: ‘‘Which characters and

statements moved you the most? Why? What facial expressions, scenery or other

images elicited the strongest reactions? At what points were you surprised? Angry?

Sad?’’ (Time, 2002a, p. 1). Similarly, in the discussion guide accompanying Two

Towns, viewers are asked to identify the ‘‘character’’ they identify with the most and

to ‘‘think of one or two words that describe what you feel’’ (2002, p. 4). In the

‘‘Examining Prejudice’’ lesson plan, students are prompted to record certain

responses while watching the film, including what they learned, what surprised

them, what made them happy, and what made them upset (POV, 2002a, p. 2).

In these activities, viewers are instructed to have certain emotions; in recording

them, they are asked to have them at the appropriate moments in the viewing

experience. This process is a structuring of feelings around a set of social and political

norms. That is, there is an implicit lesson about what emotions students should name

and claim. Given the context of the educational material (as a task of transforma-

tion), this process of witnessing and self-disclosure becomes a task of measuring one’s

own self against those selves displayed in the film, and both against a set of social

norms. This task is one of aligning emotions with social and political norms*a task

that the materials assist. In the discussion of why teach The Laramie Project, the film

is positioned as a tool that can help teachers in their task of getting students to

‘‘internalize lessons so that they become relevant to the learners’ own world’’ (Time

2002a, p. 2). As the questions students are asked to document suggest, the lessons

students are to internalize are largely ones of proper emotions; specifically, emotions

proper to liberal-tolerant citizenship. In each set of lesson plans, there are

exhortations to identify with those who embody tolerance. Students are asked to

find models of tolerance, as examples of good behavior to embody. In the Laramie

Project materials, students are asked to identify the most and least tolerant individuals

in the program and discuss their behavior (Time, 2002a, p. 2). In the ‘‘Examining

Prejudice’’ lesson plan, students are asked to role-play in small groups, embodying

individuals and interactions they viewed in the documentary, and then discuss what

happened in the interaction (POV, 2002a). The discussion guide asks viewers to note

which ‘‘characters’’ they identified with the most and why (Discussion Guide, 2002).

In these lessons, students are asked to identify and embody examples of tolerance and

264 J. Petersen

intolerance. Prejudice and intolerance comprise the bad feelings and dispositions that

students are asked to analyze, pinpoint, condemn, and dis-identify with. Lesson plans

discuss the benefits of tolerance and charge students with thinking through how to

evaluate tolerance (who or what is more or less tolerant) and promote it (Time,

2002a, p. 2). This process of highlighting good and bad feelings is a process of

teaching subjectivities proper to citizenship, as envisioned through the institutions

and individuals producing these educational guides. These subjectivities, in turn, are

oriented toward and enable specific forms of political engagement and action over

others. Notably, students are oriented towards the domain of the self and the

interpersonal as the domain in which to address issues of racism, homophobia, and

social justice more broadly.

The focus on tolerance as an emotional norm to emulate is part of how the guides

focus on interpersonal relationships (and the self). The guides point out bad feelings

to exorcise*‘‘prejudice’’ and ‘‘bias’’*and suggest through their emphasis on

citizenship that this exorcism is work toward solving social problems of racism

and homophobia. These exercises contain some worthwhile lessons. For instance, the

guides ask students and other viewers to grieve for the victims of two homophobic

and racist murders (and, in some extension activities, other similar victims closer to

home) as acts of injustice. Students are asked to examine their own situations in what

are at times complex relations of racism and heterosexism. They are asked to query

their own distances from others they perceive as different from themselves within a

broader context of not only personal feeling but of justice, and to develop positive

dispositions towards diversity. These are, all in all, emotional scenarios that support a

version of citizenship alive to issues of discrimination, injustice, and the sometimes

mundane venues of their reproduction.

However, the emotions that are legitimated do more than broaden students’ sense

of empathy and injustice. These instructions on emotions also pose tolerance as the

public political emotion that best orients us toward the goals of democracy: equity,

justice, and citizen empowerment. As demonstrated by the identification activity

outlined above, this use of tolerance recasts political and structural issues in terms of

personal intentions and interpersonal tension. While work on the self and relations

with other people is important political work, these feelings do not necessarily

encompass or encourage questions of justice. Further, the very emotions encouraged

work to support a logic and politics that recreate the conditions of injustice. Wendy

Brown (2006) notes that the discourse of tolerance works both to normalize the social

hierarchies it purports to undermine and to shift questions of justice from state to

individuals. In this shift, the discourse of tolerance fits within neoliberal politics and

policy. While tolerance within the tradition of liberal political theory can include such

valuable goals as openness to the ‘‘other’’ (Walzer, 1997), it is more often employed in

contemporary political discourse to denote restraint from acting against those

considered ‘‘undesirable’’ (Brown, 2006). This use of tolerance suggests a hierarchal

relation: those who tolerate are civilized and virtuous, while those who are tolerated

are perhaps less civilized; this actively preserves the marginal status of those who are

tolerated. The idea of tolerance, when used as a public, political goal, then, has the

Media as Sentimental Education 265

effect of naturalizing divisions between those who tolerate and those who are

tolerated. Seen in this light, tolerance reinforces the idea that the tolerated are

deviant, in effect recreating the very grounds for both violence and legal exclusion

that, on the face of things, tolerance would seem to abhor.

Further, positioning tolerance as a public good and casting ideal or normative

visions of liberal democracy within the framework of tolerance eviscerates any more

robust articulation of a just, equal, and caring society. The forwarding of tolerance as

an ideal political disposition proposes a rather empty and insufficient ‘‘feeling’’ that,

in its thinness, does not recognize the depth, life, and barbarity of systems of

inequality based in race, class, and sex/gender (Dussel, 2004). As a political feeling

that provides the orientation and grounds for action, tolerance does not orient

toward dismantling hierarchies, but offers a more peaceable way of living within

them*at least for those in positions of privilege and power. To critique tolerance is

not to embrace intolerance, but rather to forward a stronger social ethic or norm,

such as solidarity, responsibility (Dussel, 2004), various models of reciprocity

(Benhabib, 1992; Young, 1997), or inter-dependence with the other (see Butler,

2003; Hirschmann, 1996)*or, in a different vein, to forward feelings of outrage that

orient toward action, dismantling hierarchies and demanding structural and legal

change.

Tolerance, as a feeling central to citizenship, produces a citizen embedded and

embodied in the privatizing politics of neoliberalism rather than a citizen attuned to

and oriented against structures of inequality. The individuating lens of tolerance, as

taught in these lessons, instructs students to evaluate questions of social justice

through an intensive monitoring of themselves and their immediate interpersonal

surroundings. Lessons that train students to feel and act in ‘‘unbiased’’ and ‘‘tolerant’’

ways and to monitor friends and family tell students that the proper response to

injustice is action in the personal sphere. These lessons shift the responsibility for

creating the ground for equality and for remedying inequality from mechanisms of

the state to actions of the individual, in his or her immediate social circle. That is,

tolerance here suggests that the proper site for redressing social injustice is the

intimate sphere.

Positioning tolerance as an emotional norm (a feeling proper to citizenship) also,

importantly, orients toward and enables certain forms of action over others. In the

lesson plans, this is made clear in the extension activities offered to students: activities

meant to extend the lessons in feeling like a citizen into specific ways of enacting this

feeling. In the extension activities, the political positions and actions that follow from

the emotions and subjectivities encouraged in the materials are outlined. Here,

the actions, political discourses, and even institutions underwritten by tolerance are

hinted at. The guide for The Laramie Project offers students a two-pronged response

to homophobia or ‘‘intolerance’’: examination for prejudices and behavioral reform

within oneself and one’s peer group and advocating for hate crimes laws. The second

response is suggested on the first page of the student guide, which features the

responses to two questions from a Time/CNN poll: a majority of those polled

believed an attack like that against Matthew Shepard could occur in their community,

266 J. Petersen

and a majority of those polled supported including anti-gay attacks in hate crimes

laws. These questions and answers, and the text surrounding them, address

homophobia solely through the lens of physical attacks. The first response is

cued in the following pages. Call-out boxes ask students to examine their own

un-examined prejudices by thinking about the following:

How wide is my circle of friends? How diverse is my holiday card list? How

integrated is my neighborhood? Why is that? Do I belong to private clubs that

exclude? How often am I in the minority? Do I have the courage to ask a friend not

to tell a sexist joke in my presence? How can I go out of my way to know people

who appear different? (Time, 2002b, p. 3)

The questions encourage critical self-reflection upon everyday practices and member-

ships and how they link up to larger political and social problems of inequalities

along lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality*although the questions and materials

do not directly address forms of segregation and legal disenfranchisement for sexual

minorities or draw attention to class as an axis of inequality. The student materials

stress the non-existence of hate crime laws in Wyoming, where the attack occurred,

and in many other states. Among the proposed extension activities are volunteering

with an organization working toward hate crimes legislation and writing letters

supporting hate crimes legislation to elected officials. That existing laws and policies

may institutionalize discrimination (a particularly salient issue in current discussions

of anti-gay discrimination) is not mentioned either as background or as a site for

intervention anywhere in the teaching guide. While the move to critical reflection on

the politics of membership is a good first step, the materials stop short. Casting the

murder(s) as aberrations from national politics and law absolves political and legal

structures from culpability, again linking homophobia and racism to individual

behavior and local contexts more than to dominant political structures and social

norms. In positioning the avenues for redress as tolerance and volunteering, the

materials avoid any suggestion that state agencies or other non-state institutions

(media, church, or employers) need to act to remedy homophobia and anti-gay

discrimination.

The extension materials in the ‘‘Examining Prejudice’’ lesson plan (for use with

Two Towns) follow a similar pattern. The extension activities include ideas for what to

do on International Tolerance Day and links to lists of individual actions students can

take to fight intolerance from the American Psychological Association and Tolerance.

org. While these ideas include many laudable goals, including joining a social justice

group, the majority focus on individual responses to expressions of overt (‘‘old

fashioned’’) racism and on researching, thwarting, and lobbying against organized

hate groups. The Discussion Guide (2002) takes a more interpersonal position.

Students are asked to think of past examples of racism they have observed, from

‘‘thoughtless comments’’ to ‘‘acts of extreme violence’’ and to reflect on their

responses (p. 5). The lesson asks whether in the future their reaction will be the same.

This reflection on past actions (or inactions) through the lens of racism as a social

problem is implicitly aimed at getting viewers to judge past actions and commit to

Media as Sentimental Education 267

more proactive opposition to racism (within the somewhat limiting interpersonal

framework offered here). These are, of course, worthy goals and activities. However,

they keep the definition of racism within the bounds of ‘‘old fashioned’’ racism, or the

intentional and open use of white supremacist logic and language that is commonly

disavowed in mainstream political discourse as a relic of the past (Bonilla-Silva, 2003;

Omi & Winant, 1994). They also focus on the private sphere as the arena for

combating racism. Other than joining a social justice group, none of the extension

activities suggested in these guides provide responses aimed at structural racism and/

or the various neoliberal policies that maintain racial and economic stratifications.

The extent to which the lesson plans and the emotions they encourage are bound

and limited by a neoliberal view of citizenship is illustrated in the final lesson plan,

‘‘Examining White Privilege.’’ This lesson plan has remained in the background for

most of the article, because it is the only one that does not to thematize emotions

within its activities. Students are nowhere asked to record, confess, or otherwise

discuss their feelings about white privilege within the movie or within their lives.

However, in contrast to its companion lesson plan, ‘‘Examining Prejudice,’’ student

emotions are a major concern in the instructions to teachers. In the instructions for

the lesson plan, teachers are cautioned not to force students to write about their own

experiences of privilege (or lack of privilege) unless it is something they judge their

class to be ‘‘comfortable’’ with (POV, 2002b, p. 4). The students are asked to read

Peggy McIntosh’s (1990) essay on white privilege and then to note instances of white

privilege in the film. However, the reading assignment is embedded in a lesson about

the KKK and extension activities focusing on hate crimes. Using hate crimes and the

KKK as paradigms of white privilege detracts from McIntosh’s focus on the privileges

embedded in the everyday, which accrue to and benefit anyone identifiable as white.

Similarly, an activity that asks students to write about their own experiences with

privilege (provided they are comfortable doing so) places white privilege in

equivalence with the ‘‘privileges’’ given to A students: ‘‘for example honors students

are often times able to do things that other students can’t not because of individual

merit but because of the reputation of the group’’ (POV, 2002b, p. 4). The concept of

inherited privilege, as a social position one inhabits, is replaced in this example by a

concept of merit, albeit group merit. In these lessons, the structural critique is

stripped from the concept of white privilege. Rather than connect student experiences

and subjectivities to histories and structures of racial hierarchy and exclusion, the

lesson plan reduces white privilege to intentionality similar to that emphasized in

the other lesson plans. Between the focus on organized white supremacist groups and

the downplaying of structural critique, the lesson plan carefully protects student

feelings, with a special care for the feelings of those who identify through whiteness,

evading any suggestion that a recipient of white privilege might have a sense of

responsibility or duty. Such a sense, and indeed the critical concept of white privilege,

go against the grain of dominant neoliberal discourses of racism (and heterosexism,

classism, and able-ism) as matters of individual intent and choice, in which material

racial inequality is explained away by personal and group choice (Omi & Winant,

1994). The problems raised by white privilege most certainly do not fit within the

268 J. Petersen

solution of tolerance. As such, white privilege is re-scripted to fit within the notion of

tolerance that pervades the educational materials.

The limitations of these teaching materials are on display in the difference between

the explicit work on student emotions (recording, discussing, and emulating

emotions) in the ‘‘Examining Prejudice’’ lesson plan and the implicit care for the

emotions of students who identify themselves through whiteness that structures and

constrains the ‘‘Examining White Privilege’’ lesson plan. Only forms of oppression

and marginalization that have fairly well accepted forms of existing social or legal

remedy are explored. Those that do not have remedies within existing political

structures, and that are potentially challenging to students’ identities, are softened

and less fully explored. Limited definitions of racism and anti-gay discrimination as

individual behavior are more easily dealt with within the frameworks of neoliberalism

and tolerance, the desired emotional stance of citizenship in these materials. The

centrality of tolerance as a political emotion is clear in, among other places, the

choice of extension activity for the white privilege lesson plan. The action proposed

in this lesson plan is to research a different hate crime and to discuss how privilege

(of any sort) factored into the crime. There are no other political actions that

tolerance, as used in these teaching materials, enables when it comes to issues of

privilege. The willingness of the teaching materials to engage in a critical political

project stops short of a true critical stance: being willing to produce political

subjectivities critical of the political system in which they are located.

Rather, the political subjectivities tutored in this lesson plan follow those offered in

the other educational materials analyzed here. The materials are remarkably similar in

the way they figure the relationship between individuals, institutions, and the state.

The emotions and actions suggested in the teaching materials distributed with each

program suggest ‘‘tolerance’’ among individuals. As demonstrated by the lesson plan

on white privilege, the lessons falter when attempting to go beyond individual

intention and interaction. This lesson fails in its attempt to frame white privilege

within individual interactions, a generalized difference (white privilege being equal to

the privileges accorded to good students), and organized hate groups. The lessons

cannot or will not address the complicity of institutions (including extra-state

institutions like schools and media as well as state institutions like the law) in white

privilege, or ask students to see their own identities, emotions, and experiences as

partially products of structures beyond their control. This inability to mobilize

student emotions toward a critical assessment of institutions and government is

evident throughout the lesson plans. In the PBS materials, the state and extra-state

institutions are largely absent: students are only taught to manage their feelings for

and relationships with one another. In the HBO materials, student emotions are

trained toward the deficiency of the law, in the suggestion to lobby for hate crimes

legislation. While such lobbying is a laudable action, the focus on the lack of hate

crimes laws, over that of employment and anti-discrimination laws, corrals state-

directed action to requesting laws that police interpersonal violence, once again

returning questions of inequality to the realm of individual interaction and

interpersonal violence. The problem of homophobia is, even in these lessons, located

Media as Sentimental Education 269

within individuals, and placed within the private realm. Redress for oppressions and

injustice, once figured as a matter for both state and citizen, is here fully outsourced

onto individuals. This outsourcing fits the subjectivity proper to neoliberal citizen-

ship, in which individuals take on risk and responsibility, and social issues are solved

through the market-like mechanisms of lifestyle choice.

It is remarkable that the same lessons on neoliberal citizenship are offered from

PBS, with its mandate to serve the public, and HBO, a fully market-based outlet of a

media mega-corporation (Time Warner). This overlap in the way citizenship is

envisioned in institutions governed by public interest and by profit performatively

demonstrates the entwining of definitions of the public good and the bottom line

often accomplished in neoliberal discourse. The subjectivity encouraged within the

PBS lesson plans, produced with an eye to public service, coincides with that

encouraged within the HBO lesson plans, produced with an eye to market

competition and brand distinction. Both sets of lesson plans normalize the

outsourcing of questions of social justice, training subjects that the interpersonal is

the domain of justice. Of course, PBS has never followed the public service model

that Western European and Canadian TV do, fully funded by public monies and

guided by a duty to entertain and inform the public, broadly conceived. PBS has

always been a bit of a hybrid public and private institution, regulated and partially

overseen by governmental agencies but never fully underwritten by public funds. PBS

programming reflects this fact: it is geared toward an affluent and educated audience

most likely to donate (Hoynes, 2003). With the reduction in federal funding to PBS

over the last decades, the reliance of U.S. ‘‘public’’ TV on private sources such as

corporate underwriting and individual donation has only increased, much to the

dismay of many supporters of public television. In this context, the funding and

programming of PBS is ever more entwined with neoliberal logics such as the ability

of the market to stand in for the public and define the public interest. However,

whereas PBS is supposed to produce materials in the public interest, HBO is only

supposed to produce materials that further its market share. The distribution of

educational materials with programs such as The Laramie Project is, for HBO, a

furthering of brand distinction. HBO distinguishes itself as ‘‘quality TV’’ in order to

justify the expense of subscription: for a fee, subscribers get something more than

regular TV. The educational materials, then, help to position The Laramie Project as

quality programming and HBO itself as a producer of serious social commentary.

The lesson plans, in addition to directing young proto-viewers and readers to Time

Warner content, also extend HBO’s project of quality programming by offering such

civic-minded content as citizenship lessons. Of course, HBO’s claims to quality are as

much defined by pursuit of a target audience as by the textual merits of the programs

themselves (Jaramillo, 2002).

The citizenship education offered by HBO is, then, shaped by notions of quality

that are in turn shaped by marketing. We see in the supplementary educational

materials produced by both institutions that the mechanisms of the market and

mechanisms of the public interest converge in the way they define and cultivate the

emotions and actions proper to citizenship. Each institution articulates a similar

270 J. Petersen

vision of the sensibilities required of good citizens: citizens willing and able to police

racism and homophobia in their selves and their interpersonal relationships and in

doing so to take on issues of justice in a way that figures justice as a domestic concern

rather than a distributive or legal one (concerns of the state). These sensibilities, the

actions and inactions suggested in the materials, support the arrangements between

citizen, state, and institutions defined above as neoliberalism.

Conclusion

The educational materials, and the institutions that produced them (PBS and HBO/

Time Warner), make Two Towns and The Laramie Project educational media texts.

However, the education they provide is not only in the subject matter covered in

these two programs. It is also an education in political subjectivity and citizenship.

Toward this end, the educational materials propose helping students unlearn received

racisms and homophobias. Overall, these are not bad lessons. However, their

emphasis on tolerance as an ideal feeling and basis for action and citizenship

undermines this goal. By connecting the emotions taught to the actions that these

emotions enable (and disable), these emotional lessons can be linked to larger

political structures. In these lessons, the emotional norms taught deflect critical

intervention from the connections among neoliberalism, the discourse of tolerance,

student identities, and systems of oppression. There is little room in these lessons for

critical perspectives that challenge core notions of individualism and voluntarist

politics, such as explorations of white privilege. Rather than cultivating student

emotions against exclusion and injustice (through a closer identification with the

targets of racism and homophobia and an ethic of care, or through an orientation

against structures and institutions that enable discrimination and injustice), the

materials produce student emotions in line with dominant political structures and

discourses of neoliberalism.

Tracing the way that sentiment is used in these lesson plans from the specific

emotions and language encouraged to the actions that are supposed to follow from

these emotions, it is possible to see how these lessons are structured by a neoliberal

vision of citizenship, and indeed increasingly neoliberal institutions. As is made clear

through the extension activities, the actions proper to this vision of citizenship are

individual and voluntarist actions. The emphasis on tolerance as a set of individual

behaviors and dispositions that students can and should embody as good citizenship

is part of the larger neoliberal discourse on tolerance, described by Brown (2006),

which shifts responsibility for issues of equity and justice onto individuals and the

market. Tolerance as a set of feelings or subjectivity proper to good citizens fits within

neoliberal visions of citizenship in the way that it defines emotions and actions geared

toward regulation of difference*a regulation that takes place through lifestyle,

individual actions, and voluntarism.

What I hope this analysis illustrates is how media discourse on feelings works as a

site of political struggle and political pedagogy. It is possible to trace the politics of

such deployments of feeling and to draw connections between the emotional norms

Media as Sentimental Education 271

encouraged in these examples of educational media and larger political and economic

structures. Issues of emotion and identification run through audio-visual media texts,

making them particularly fruitful sites for such analysis. Understanding how the

emotional work of media texts can also be political work is a valuable lens on the

political interventions and efficacy of not only media texts but also media

institutions, especially in a political atmosphere in which politics, regulation, and

education are diffused across various public and private institutions.

Notes

[1] There were other TV movies: Showtime’s Jasper, NBC’s The Matthew Shepard Story, and

MTV’s Anatomy of a Hate Crime. The Laramie Project and the Two Towns of Jasper, however,

were the only two to be circulated as educational texts.

[2] Increasingly, the classic division of public and private that permeates liberal law and political

theory is blurring. Things that once were clearly private, such as the division of labor in the

home, are arguably matters of public and even policy debate. In this context, in which this

line is no longer clear, to argue (as some scholars do) that emphasis on the ‘‘private’’ sphere is

an act of de-politicization is at the very least problematic nomenclature.

[3] See in particular Probyn (2005) and Sedgwick (2003).

[4] See Koziak (2000) for more on dis-interest as an emotion.

[5] The political stakes of desire and self-image are starkly pointed out in Giroux’s (2006)

analysis of the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: he explains the structural

failings through, among other things, a politics and unequal distribution of care. This

distribution of care is central to analysis of the commitments that motivated the lack of

governmental action. The neoliberal response to Katrina called upon a particular structure of

feeling that did not encourage identification with, empathy with, or responsibility toward the

victims.

[6] This was the first of several educational-promotional projects put together by HBO and

Tolerance.org. Educational packaging of Mighty Times and One Survivor Remembers

followed.

[7] The discussion guide is more open-ended than the classroom guides, aimed at generating

discussion among community members. As such, the pedagogy of the discussion guide is

often more flexible than that of classroom lesson plans.

[8] Indeed, there is evidence that the young men who killed Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.

thought that their actions would be viewed sympathetically by the authorities. In the case of

the murder of Matthew Shepard, this is made clear in the recent revisions to the young men’s

stories in a new 20/20 special (Vargas, 2004) that purported to show that the murder had not

been a hate crime, as ABC advertised, the new testimony that the murderers made up the

homophobic rationale in the belief that the authorities would go easier on them dramatically

underscores both the status of hate crime and the complicity of the law.

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