Erotic pedagogy towards a desiring conviviality: a visual collective biography joining island and continent

ABSTRACT

How might an erotic pedagogy come to emancipate girls’ corpo-subjectivities shaped by compulsive heterosexuality? We sail our ‘tercermundistas’ girlhoods doing a visual collective biography in round trips between a neoliberal country and an island with communist ambitions. Through unravelling common entangled introjections of compulsive heterosexuality – a control dispositive entrenched in the colonial/modern gender system – , we invent desiring conviviality to validate the potential creative hope triggered by persistent practices of warm-welcoming minimal differences or desires. This is a po(ethic) onto-epistemological dislocation to queer-decolonise the promise of peace semiotically linked to ‘convivencia’ in Education, embracing a chaotic, imaginative, and passionate critical conviviality instead.

KEYWORDS:

• Erotic pedagogy
• desiring conviviality
• compulsive heterosexuality
• visual collective biography
• girlhoods

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editorial Committee and reviewers working on this Special Issue. Especially to Belén Hernando-Lloréns, who generously supported the whole process of improving this article, creating personalised opportunities to clarify arguments and make crucial recommendations. Warm comments, key references, and the dialogical spirit that all provided to us – emergent researchers – is a truthful example that a caring-feminist academic world can be more than an expectation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We displayed the following searching sequences: ‘heterosexual*’ AND ‘conviviality’ AND (‘education*’ OR ‘pedagogic*’); or ‘sexual diversity’ AND ‘conviviality’ AND (‘education*’ OR ‘pedagogic*’), and did not find related publications in Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, neither Scielo databases.

2 Intentionally we write straight (throughout all the text) in its colloquial use as an antonym of gay, fag, and queer. Exactly as Britzman (1995) does when she calls ‘stop reading straight’ to open queer pedagogies as another possibility. The same semantic inspiration follows Sara Ahmed in the book ‘Queer Phenomenology Orientations, Objects, Others’, placing it as more than a sexual-affective orientation, but a global one that imperceptibly configures our perceptions producing the straight as neutral and natural. Thus, a desirable state to achieve versus twisted-queer performances requires being straightened up (Ahmed 2006).

3 We reviewed the official regulation of school coexistence of emblematic high schools in Chile –one mixed and two mono-genders– and the official national school discipline code in Cuba. Phrases between quotes has been extracted from both devices: haircuts ‘associated with urban cultures’ with figures, letters, texts, or afro-braids, ‘fantasy hairstyles’; makeup; nail polish or colour dyes that contradict the ‘natural tones of the person who wears them’; wearing skirts ‘more than four fingers above the knee’, ‘more than 100 millimetres over the kneecap’; ‘extravagant’ big earrings or ‘t-shirts with a pronounced neckline and exposing the abdomen’ – in case of ‘ladies’; ‘sleeveless shirts’ and earrings, in the case of men; raising hands to intervene during classes; standing up when a school authority or a visitant comes to the classroom; do not interrupt conversations without permission (Liceo Bicentenario Marta Narea Díaz 2020; Liceo Carmela Carvajal de Prat 2020; Liceo Manuel Barros Borgoño 2021; MINED 2015)

4 For more information: https://www.latercera.com/opinion/noticia/neo-pacificacion-de-la-araucania/TD7KT432FRA5LHHLXNN475V3NU/.

5 For more information: https://www.ecured.cu/Coexistencia_Pac%C3%ADfica; https://www.cibercuba.com/noticias/2021-05-28-u192519-e192519-s27061-presidente-angola-disculpa-masacres-intervinieron-tropas.

6 ‘Abya Yala’ means mature land, ‘living or blooming in land’ according to the Kuna language (indigenous peoples’ language from current Colombia and Panama). In 1977 the World Council of Indigenous Peoples decided to coin this term to name the territory from the Bravo River to Patagonia. Since then, this term is considered a symbol of identity and respect to the aboriginal peoples’ roots that inhabited and still inhabit these lands (Carrera-Maldonado and Ruiz-Romero 2016; Centro Nacional de Acción Pastoral 1992).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Agency of Research and Development (ANID-Chile), Beca de Doctorado Nacional 2018, Grants 21181374 and 21180260; and with translation funds provided by PhD Program in Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado.