Media as Sentimental Education: The Political Lessons of HBO's The Laramie Project and PBS's Two Towns of Jasper

摘要

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.