The otherwise possibilities of pleasure: a post-intentional phenomenological exploration of students’ literacy experiences

Abstract

In this dissertation I take up post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2025) to explore the phenomenon of pleasure, asking: how might pleasure be provoked and produced for undergraduates in and through their literacy experiences? And what might that pleasure provoke and produce? Inspired by my time teaching first-year writing at the university, this study takes seriously students’ affective responses to reading and writing, with a focus on how pleasure takes shape and why pleasure matters. The study is rooted in an understanding of pleasure that is expansive and critical, personal and political, and deeply informed by the work of adrienne maree brown (2019)’s pleasure activism—“the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (p. 13). The literacy focus of this work affords a specific entry point into pleasure and allows the research to join the discourse of those in education who talk and write about the purpose and power of literacy in the current age.Post-intentional phenomenology, or PIP, draws on phenomenological and poststructural philosophies to seek a layered, entangled way of thinking, writing, and doing (Vagle, 2015, 2025). During analysis, the post-intentional phenomenologist works the three points of the PIP Triangle, considering in equal measure the study’s theoretical concepts, phenomenological material (data), and post-reflexions. In this study I gathered phenomenological material through semi-structured conversations with 12 study participants, all former students, along with their pleasure reflections (freewrites) and excerpts from their course writing. Throughout the study I kept a post-reflexive journal where I captured my analytic, emotional, and embodied responses to the research process in an effort to “see what frames my seeing” (Vagle, 2025). Finally, I engaged with analysis in two layers: first, I thought with affect (Ahmed, 2006, 2010, 2014) and presencing (Simpson, 2011, 2017) to ask: how might pleasure be provoked and produced for undergraduates in and through their literacy experiences? Second, I thought with neoliberal multiculturalism (Melamed, 2011), pleasure activism (brown, 2019), and resistance (Hersey, 2022) to ask: what might that pleasure provoke and produce? Through working the PIP Triangle I learned that pleasure matters because of what it reveals. Pleasure in and of itself is not necessarily the goal; feeling pleasure is our clue that something important is going on. What was happening for my study participants when they felt pleasure being provoked and produced? Deep learning. Authentic connection with others, in community. (Re)claiming their identities. Autonomy and creativity. Feeling present in their bodies. Showing up honest and whole. I also learned that experiences of pleasure can function as personal resistance to neoliberal multicultural systems, including the system of higher education. The dissertation ends with an exploration of the otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2014, 2016) that this critical understanding of pleasure opens up.