“An Evil Text”: Chilean National Writing Plan and Students Becoming Writers with Villainy

Abstract

This article examines high school students’ responses to an exercise from the Chilean National Writing Plan which invited students to “write an evil text.” The data was analyzed through a diffractive reading using affect theory. We asked the texts: What do affective repertoires related to villainy do to students becoming writers? We describe the affirmative potential of these affects and strategies used by students becoming writers to contest normative childhood and youth relations with cultural products and affective repertoires in education. Based on our findings, we posit that the entanglements between writing exercises, student writers, and villainy produced non-normative affects related to evilness, which in turn assembled into cultural zones of exception in which children and youth could speculate around complex topics such as the pleasures related to violence.