“Leaping from the wings to center stage:” The conditions of emergence of Georgia’s “divisive concepts” law

This poststructural feminist article employs Foucault’s concepts power/knowledge and governmentality to explore the conditions of emergence of Georgia’s divisive concepts law. It argues that the material-discursive mechanisms of power/knowledge relations are producing a new “regime of truth” in pedagogy by constituting teachers’ practices as problematic and disciplining them through the threat of delinquency. This analysis provides glimpses of power at the point of its intention, the bodies of educators in schools, through “capillary vignettes.” The currents of circulating power relations are followed as they are transformed and extended beyond the institution of the public school to larger mechanisms in society that are actively producing new norms about what is considered “good teaching.” Investigating the conditions of emergence cultivates the strategic knowledge necessary to resist and refuse how educators are being constituted as subjects under the law.