Touching, Feeling, Failing: Pedagogical touch as a queer relation

This paper explores the pedagogical potential of emotional touch through a queer framework informed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). Challenging the distancing tendencies of traditional pedagogy, Sedgwick foregrounds affective attunement, vulnerability, and relational presence over critique, mastery, and detachment, offering new possibilities for engaging failure in art and design education. Following Sedgwick, I propose touch becomes most visible through moments of resonance, discomfort, and shared uncertainty - when something “touches” us it opens new affective and epistemological pathways. In this paper, I ask, what does it mean to be emotionally touched through pedagogical encounters? What are the political and affective stakes of embracing touch in contemporary pedagogical discourse? How might touch redefine our relationship to failure in the classroom?

Situating touch as an ethical gesture, I argue that pedagogical touch, expressed through moments of resonance and disorientation, offers a critical means of reimagining failure as a potentially generative rupture. Drawing from interdisciplinary teaching practices, including collaborative inquiry, storytelling, and material engagement, I theorize pedagogical touch as a reparative pedagogical method. I argue failure and touch co-constitute the affective and epistemic textures of learning, challenging hegemonic narratives of individualized forms of resilience, achievement, and productivity. Such practices foster spaces in which failure becomes a site of shared reflection and relationality. I advocate for a queer pedagogical orientation that holds space for feeling failure as a mode of collective attunement, care, and the transformative possibilities of learning through touch.