"We're Going to Kill Your Father": Disruptive Play and Its Affective Dimensions

To exclusively align children’s play with joy limits the possibility of understanding what play means for children when it does not fall neatly into the comfortable categories of being normal, safe, kind, or caring. When play is risky and uncomfortable, wild and chaotic, when it shocks and challenges normative conventions—especially in schools—adults consider it disruptive. In this article, we examine a kindergartener’s artistic production of “demonic gingerbread people” using two layers to read this play event. Using a critical childhoods lens, we propose empathy as an alternative to jumping immediately to intervention in response to disruptive play. Using affect theory, we think and experiment with these gingerbread productions to consider the affordances of approaching students' disruptive play with wonder. This layered approach may attune us to new possibilities for conceptualizing children’s subversive play.