The brutality of normalcy: schooling in My Friend Dahmer

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers My Friend Dahmer as a pedagogical document of educational critique. A graphic novel memoir, My Friend Dahmer depicts the teenage life of Jeffrey Dahmer in the years before he gained notoriety as a serial killer. One of the memoir’s central tensions is that at Dahmer’s school, even a serial-killer-in-the-making struggles to be seen, in fact fails at it, instead becoming an unexceptional feature of its landscape. Focusing on three factors – invisibility, exclusion, and alienation – the article interrogates how normalised schooling structures can represent a series of hidden brutalities that are far more common, pervasive, and socially consequential than the exceptional, sensational, and thus more easily dismissible notion of brutality that Dahmer himself embodies. It suggests that My Friend Dahmer contributes to our cultural understandings of education to the extent that it helps to locate these hidden brutalities and render them visible in graphic novel form.