Gender issues in the arena of education and the torsion and refutation guidelines

Abstract

This article aims to think about gender issues in the field of Brazilian education, understood as the arena where two perspectives on gender are disputed. In the first one, gender is understood as twisting, since it is thought in opposition to the notion instituted historically, posed as a problem for thought and apprehended as a possibility forged in culture and in relations of know-power. The second refers to the question of gender as a refutation to torsion, denies it as an artifact of culture, and establishes it as a biological and naturalistic dimension in the composition of sex and sexuality in which biological sex, sexuality and gender coincide. In this perspective gender issues are taken as an ideology, and as such, must be denied, silenced, refuted. The two perspectives, in the Brazilian present time, set up a scenario of debates and disputes about processes of constitution of the student subject and of the government of their sexual, social and political conducts. Reflections on such issues are theoretically grounded in the thinking of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, anchored in the notions of “subject constitution,” “governmentality,” “discourse,” and “performativity.”