Eventos Académicos, 39 ISCHE. Educación y emancipación

Tamaño de fuente: 
Touching Pedagogical Discourses and its Diaspora: Sex Education and Gender Regulations after the Modern Scientific Definition of Sexuality
Juan Péchin

Última modificación: 2017-07-17

Resumen


Historically, the sexualisation of human experience has been an intrinsic axis of the very processes of socialization, based on an exhaustive binary male-female as a primary condition of subjectivity. As a (post)colonial legacy, the institutionalization of the sex-gender system has reached a global scope through mutual reinforcement between clinical and educational regulations of subjectivity. The processes of cultural and scientific exchange, in this primarily European matrix, formulated a system of legitimate sexuality which was then assimilated and redefined in the American and Latin American States to perform citizenship. This resulted in the development of specific technologies of masculinization/feminization throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which were then broadcast through an articulated formation of nodal institutions like the national army, conscription and mass public access to schooling, reassuring the male domain of the electoral and labour markets. Along with this, there was a scientifically imposed regulatory regime of compulsory heterosexuality that broke with earlier religious and moral discourses to enclose sex and sexuality in the field of natural sciences under the legitimacy of the judicial system and rooted in pedagogical and clinical practices. From various disciplines, such scientific discourse was put into crisis and exposed as discriminatory, racist, and colonialist as it considered as valid and desirable only certain types of physical characteristics and practices that held the model citizen as a white, heterosexual, male adult, with no physical or mental disabilities. This then produced the devaluation not only of women, but also a multiplicity of non- traditional bodies and subjectivities in terms of sex and gender. These medical, psychiatric, legal and criminological discourses constructed a series of classifications that still work as social hierarchies and have eventually become naturalized, being incorporated into a logic of common sense based on certain stereotypes and misconceptions of institutional origin which in turn work to maintain such a state of naturalization regarding sex-gender education. The strengthening of current discourses on “sexual orientation” on which the ontological separation “homosexuality-heterosexuality” is based, the monogamous sexual order in couples, the penalization of abortion related to the social mandate of motherhood, the criminalization of prostitution in contrast to the proliferation of networks of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, the anthologizing of masturbatory practices as well as that of trans identities and gender expressions that challenge the traditional roles of male and female –among other interventions on the body and subjectivity to perform citizenship- have been developing over a complex device on pedagogical practices with varying degrees of formality in the institutionalization and socialization of males and females in school, and have driven specific rituals to ensure the validity of a heterosexist and patriarchal family pattern. In this sense, the design of school life has persisted as a crucial location for the ritualization of public performance. I intend to explore European and American debates around sex/ual education to problematize the modes to historicize it in Argentina.