Palabras clave: afecto; cuerpo; educación; emoción; género; pedagogía; política.

Postmodernity is marked by the return of the “others” of modernity: women, the sexual Other of men, the ethnic or native Other of the Eurocentric subject and the natural or terrestrial Other of technoculture emerge as counter-subjectivities. Given the structural importance of these “others” as props that confirm the “same” in its dominant subject position, their “return” coincides with a crisis of the structures and boundaries of classical subjectivity, which challenges its very foundations.
Rosi Braidotti (2005, p. 148)

1. BREAKING WITH THE OBVIOUS: RETHINKING GENDER

Transforming reality implies confronting the most solid form of its closure, that is, the way in which its consistency seems, in the light of common sense, unquestionable. This closure of reality, says the philosopher Santiago López Petit, is presented as the obvious: ‘Closure through obviousness is extremely effective, since how can we doubt what is obvious? And yet, it is an extremely fragile closure because, ultimately, it is a false closure under a background of indeterminacy’ (López Petit, 2015, p. 61).

The obvious is then nothing more than the product of a historical construction of power relations and forms of knowledge (Foucault, 2011) that normalises and institutionalises collective and individual thoughts, actions and perceptions. The obvious is conservative, it maintains a static structure that closes reality when it is questioned: ‘The obvious is the weight of the world that falls on us when we want to change it’ (López Petit, 2015, p. 61).

Seemingly irrefutable, the obvious of reality materializes when some attempt at escape or transformation is posed within its tautological and redundant power. The obvious establishes the difference between the possible and the impossible, distributing and structuring the world on the basis of that which reproduces the given and that which raises doubt, difference and dissent. The obvious attempts to reduce the later to an impotence, precisely because it operates outside the possible.

However, it is here that a fissure begins to be drawn in the heart of the real. The very possibility of an approach other than that expected by the obvious is already a form of event, that is to say, of an ‘advent to being of non-being, advent to the visible of the invisible’ (Badiou, 1999, p. 204). If the framework of the possible is constructed by the weight of reality, its transformation is always on the side of the impossible.

In the field of politics, for example, there is an epistemological approach that bases its analyses on objectivism and the theoretical production of what is called realpolitik, which recognises only the ‘given’, ‘objective’, ‘real’, ‘possible’, ‘obvious’ as the field of action. However, these perspectives diminish the field of politics by leaving out what is most characteristic of it: the capacity to imagine, transform and create. In other words, the weight of the real is intended - incessantly - to control, dominate, govern and manage the event and its unpredictability. In this sense, the event, as undecidable, is always “impossible”, but it is precisely there where the power of its transformative quality lies.

Rationalism naively claims that it is possible and necessary to suspend all subjectivity or prejudice when analysing reality. This is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called ‘the prejudice of prejudice’:

There is indeed a prejudice of the Enlightenment, which is what supports and determines its essence: this basic prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against all prejudice and thus the distortion of tradition. […] In itself ‘prejudice’ means a judgement that is formed before the definitive validation of all objectively determining moments. […] ‘Prejudice’ does not therefore in any way signify a false judgement, but it is in its concept that it can be evaluated positively or negatively. […] In the eyes of the Enlightenment the lack of a foundation does not leave room for other modes of certainty but means that the judgement has no foundation in the thing, that it is ‘a judgement without foundation’. This is a typical conclusion of the spirit of rationalism. On it rests the discrediting of prejudices in general and the claim of scientific knowledge to exclude them altogether (Gadamer, 2007, pp. 337-338).

The naivety of rationalist, objectivist and realist pretensions then lies in imagining a purely rational individual, capable of suspending his own prejudices and thus apprehending the objective reality of the world. However, such a ‘truthful man’ - as Nietzsche (2016, p. 263) has called him - does not exist, he is nothing but an abstraction that is passed off as objective and universal, but which totally detaches him from his socio-cultural reality and the horizon from which he interprets the world:

In reality, it is not history that belongs to us, but we who belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves in reflection, we are already understanding ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and the state in which we live. The lens of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-reflection of the individual is but a spark in the closed stream of historical life. That is why an individual’s prejudices are, much more than his judgements, the historical reality of his being (Gadamer, 2007, p. 344; italics in the original).

Even, as Judith Butler has pointed out, this rational individual, who is also the one in the fantasy of the ‘social contract’, is thought as having certain given qualities in advance:

An even more remarkable aspect of this fantasy of the state of nature that is often invoked as a ‘foundation’ is that, at the origin, there is a man and he is an adult, he is self-possessed and self-sufficient. […] Independence has been separated from dependence and the masculine and the feminine have been determined partly by this distribution of dependencies. The primary and founding [rational] figure is masculine. […] in other words, it is postulated that the individual who is presented to us as the first moment of the human - the appearance of the human in the world - has never been a child, as if he has never been cared for, never depended on parents, close relations or social institutions to survive, grow and (presumably) learn. […] somehow, and from the beginning, he is always willing and able, he has never been sustained or supported by others, never carried in another body to be born, never fed when he was not able to feed himself, never tucked in by someone with a blanket on cold days (Butler, 2022, pp. 42-43).

This original and rational individual that the liberal, objectivist and rationalist approaches of a pretended scientific credibility are, paradoxically, anything but empirical. However, it is nonetheless important to think about it, precisely because it has hegemonically sedimented itself as an individual capable of producing - and at the same time being the product of - discourses of ‘truth’. To be clear, it is not that one is against truth, but that truth is not something that is given a priori and has to be discovered; on the contrary, it is a matter of ‘making truth something to be created’ (Deleuze, 2018, p. 187).

Therefore, the proposal that will be put forward here is within the field of ‘the impossible’, which belongs to all spheres of existence, including, of course, the pedagogical and educational: ‘When I speak of “the impossible” I do not mean that which could never happen and will never happen. The impossible indicates the present, actual effect of something that is strictly speaking not possible in a given field of experience, but which impels people to act as if it were’ (Arditi, 2010, p. 166).

In this sense, it is important to point out that the impossible is not the impotent. On the contrary, the power of the event lies precisely in the rupture of the frameworks of the possible, to ‘make us see’ that another order of existence ‘is already possible’. It is the gesture of the sensitive event that Walter Benjamin (2016) already identified in ‘rubbing one’s eyes’ in order to look again and feel that which, despite having always been there, did not come to sensibility.

It is relevant to note that the gaze and sensibility, just like a body, are absolutely political. ‘Rubbing one’s eyes’ in order to look and focus again is not a physiological matter, nor does it respond to the qualities of the looked/sensed; on the contrary, it is about sensitive regimes that mark out politics of affect and ways of inhabiting the world.

The obvious, therefore, forms part of the paradigm of the hegemonic. Contesting hegemony and winning in it, implies producing an order and giving meaning to the social institutions that regulate the thoughts and practices of subjects. In other words, that which produces ‘common sense’: ‘What is accepted at a given moment as the “natural” order, together with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices’ (Mouffe, 2014, p. 22). This ‘sedimentation’ normalises rhythms, forms, meanings, perceptions and relations that make up the reality that is presented as objectified (Berger & Luckmann, 2008), but which is nothing more than the contingent and precarious product of a cultural proposal that has become hegemonic.

This hegemony produces narratives, perceptions and sensitivities of reality, which, when sedimented, would seem to be unquestionable and, therefore, impossible to change, as a matter of common sense and obvious. However, as Mouffe (2014) has expressed, all hegemonic practices are countered by other types of counter-hegemonic practices, whose main function is to make visible the contingent nature of this hegemony, which has settled in a certain way as a result of the relations and articulations of forces that have won over others, but which are always open to transformation, hence its precarious nature.

The politics of ‘the impossible’ and counter-hegemonic practices are complex and articulated forms of emancipation and revolt, mainly because they are an aesthetic-semantic dispute over the interpretation of the meaning of reality, as it has effects on sensibility, perception, the decipherable and the visible (Rancière, 2014). Breaking with the obvious is, therefore, a form of revolt capable of emancipating oneself from any form of subjection:

My project is to multiply everywhere, or wherever possible, the opportunities to uprise [se soulever] against the given […]. One can uprise against a type of family relationship, against a sexual relationship, one can uprise against a form of pedagogy, one can uprise against a type of information (Foucault, 2016, p. 84).

It is therefore the hegemonic force of the obvious and common sense that normalises the way we feel and perceive bodies and subjects produced by the discourses and practices of reality that are presented as given, among which are the hegemonic forms of gender configuration and the processes of subjectivation associated with them. The binary relation of gender and its alleged biological determination are presented as truisms that are sedimented and normalised. Proposing new ways of establishing gender relations, other forms of expression outside the binary logic, or what will be proposed here, going beyond gender to overcome it, is often immediately rejected with all the ‘weight of the world’ and of reality.

The struggles for sexual and gender diversity, as well as feminist movements, have deeply questioned the normalisation of a reality that, through the exercise of power through language, practices and social representations, has kept in a place of domination a multiplicity of singularities that escape the hegemonic constructions of sex, gender, the body, rationality and affections.

In this sense, Paul Preciado in his Countersexual Manifesto recovers the importance of everything that escapes, deviates or wanders: ‘The task of contrasexuality is to identify the erroneous spaces, the failures of the structure of the text […] and to reinforce the power of deviations and drifts with respect to the heterocentric system’ (Preciado, 2019, p. 18). The processes of socialisation in pedagogical contexts tend to normalise and discipline thoughts, behaviours, bodies, affects and sentiments (Fals Borda, 2009), but they always find forms of resistance based on these deviations, on the estrangements of unheard-of or impossible forces that create other discourses and other forms of individuation outside the binary logics of gender, and beyond gender, for the sake of a heterogeneous and multiple transitivity of singularities that are always under (de)construction.

Patriarchy is precisely this form of violent normalisation of the heterocentric system of reality whose effects are mainly embodied in women and people whose sexual and gender diversity breaks the heterosexual and binary-gender structure. Therefore, the gaze of a new sensibility would cease to see complete and finished beings where what exists are complex relations, flows of transmuting forces in constant becoming, given that, as Étienne Souriau points out, ‘existence can be found not only in beings, but among beings’ (Souriau, 2017, p. 105).

In this sense, seeing and feeling a body beyond gender, and understanding its existence in transition or continuous becoming, requires a new sensibility that denaturalises common perceptions and sedimented senses. Education plays a fundamental role, since it is in the space of pedagogy where the conformations of the forms of subjectivation, the relations of otherness and the place occupied in the world, which, as has been addressed, is also in continuous transformation, are most intensely played out.

In relation to the school and relations of power and domination, Catherine Walsh proposes some questions that can be triggers for critical thinking about education:

What are their perspectives, beliefs, hopes and visions about society, education and social-educational change, and what is the practical significance of these perspectives, beliefs, hopes and visions? Is there a complicity (albeit implicit) within their pedagogical practice in maintaining the dominant structures of knowledge and power, or rather a divergence that seeks to confront and deconstruct them? In what way do they assume with seriousness, conviction, commitment, and even militancy, a position and an attitude, a political, epistemic and ethical responsibility that is directed towards action and intervention, understood not as an individual but as a collective act (Walsh, 2021, p. 11).

These are ethical and political questions in the field of education that contribute to opening up the debate on the hierarchies and forms of domination implicitly and explicitly reproduced in classrooms and curricula. Particularly, when violence and domination have been normalized as epistemic racist and colonial violence, immersed in the modern configuration of education, it is essential to recover what Lia Pinheiro has said:

Historical modernity expressed, in reality, the enslavement of peoples and the denial of their existence as historical-political subjects. This modernity was considered the cradle of colonial racism; of the introjection, in the collective unconscious, of the myth that the non-white is, by definition, the villain, the root of the dependency complex of the colonised. In other words, inferiorisation as the native correlate of European superiority (Fanon, 2008). From the point of view of cultural and political domination, racism and social segregation are the essence of colonial relations and capitalist accumulation (González-Casanova, 1969). In this context, the denunciation of the dehumanising character of education emerges, in the perspective underlined by Paulo Freire (1987), as well as the role played by education and pedagogy in the processes of oppression, in the reproduction of internal colonialism (González-Casanova, 1969), of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 1999), of knowledge (Lander, 2000) and in the antagonism of class, race/ethnicity and gender. Hence the need to conceive another education, another pedagogy(ies), another school(s) (Pinheiro, 2021, p. 108; italics in the original).

This ‘other education, other pedagogy(ies), other school(s)’ are here the bet of an affective pedagogy and a post-gender education, which adds to a long tradition of pedagogy and critical educational theory that seeks to decolonise, de-racialise, de-patriarchalise, de-institutionalise and, in general, deconstruct education itself:

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed towards the search for their institutional antipode: learning networks that increase the opportunity for everyone to transform every moment of their lives into a moment of learning, of sharing, of taking an interest (Ilich, 2010, p. 14).

‘Wefts [tramas] of learning’, that are constructed in the contexts of socialisation, insofar as seeing, hearing and feeling are the result of complex processes in which the subject¹ in transition sensitively (un)learns its existence in the world. It is in this sense, in relation to gender and its sensitive, political, symbolic and cultural consequences, that patriarchy as a device of inequality and violence based on the hegemonic and dominant division of gender, is also a sensitive device in that it produces frameworks of meaning and interpretations of the world and, particularly, sensitive ways of perceiving, feeling and affecting the bodies that inhabit it. In this respect, Rita Segato reflects:

Patriarchy, or gender relations based on inequality, is humanity’s most archaic and permanent political structure. This structure, which shapes the relationship between positions of prestige and power differentials, though captured, radically aggravated and transmuted into a highly lethal order by the process of conquest and colonisation, nevertheless precedes, as a simple hierarchy and in a low-intensity or low-impact patriarchy, the colonial-modern era. The expression patriarchal-colonial-modernity aptly describes the priority of patriarchy as the appropriator of women’s bodies and of the latter as the first colony (Segato, 2016, p. 18; italics in original).

Gender relations based on inequality are configured in different aspects of everyday life: the body, intimate-affective relations, the family, work and education in the academic institution. Of course, in order to disarticulate the obvious, it would first have to be stated. Likewise, the aim is to disarticulate the hegemonic sedimentations around gender by proposing a transitional post-gender look at the way in which processes of subjectivation are produced and the importance of education and pedagogy in this.

It is in this sphere that the analysis will be carried out, since it is there that different discourses and forms of knowledge are produced and reproduced, which tend to strengthen the power structures of the patriarchal system and its precarious and violent effects on the singularities that are expressed in sexual and gender diversity.

2. POST-GENDER EDUCATION

One of the main expressions of gender inequality in academia is epistemic violence, which produces inequity, exclusion and marginalisation of voices and thoughts outside the limits of what is considered valid and rational, qualities almost always framed in the ‘anthropo-phallo-ego-logocentric’ figure (Rolnik, 2019, p. 82), to which should be added the dominant quality of “hetero” as sexual orientation and ‘cis’ as gender identity.

Raquel Güereca elaborates on the notion of ‘epistemic gender violence’ and points out that

encompasses colonial disregard for the knowledge and experiences of classes and social subjects that make up the global South, and is expressed in the invisibilisation of women’s contributions as a social subject historically excluded from the production of knowledge that shaped modern science and academic science (Güereca, 2017, p. 15).

It should be added that this colonial disregard also affects the production of ancestral knowledge of Abya Yala, particularly of the communities and native peoples, as well as the multiple and heterogeneous voices that make up gender diversity.

This violence is visible in the unequal production of knowledge and in the supposed lack of capacity for rational understanding by certain subjects who are set apart from epistemic subalternity, as well as in the way in which the knowledge of the different disciplinary fields is taught and reproduced in schools.

The historical silencing of women and gender diversity in the sphere of epistemic production within the different fields of knowledge has become a daily practice embodied in the study plans and programmes that usually make up the disciplinary fields of universities. This is what Selene Aldana, María Crisóstomo, Itzuri Moreno, Katya Vázquez and Amada Vollbert identify, in dialogue with Raquel Güereca, as some of the ‘identifiable trends in sociology and its teaching’:

This shows the ways in which there is an ‘erasure of women’ (Güereca, 2017) and other (post-) gender identities and expressions in the field of pedagogy, sociology and virtually any discipline. Likewise, the unequal distribution of key decision-making positions, as well as full-time teaching and research positions, make visible an unequal distribution of opportunities for professional development and growth. In this regard, Ana Buquet Corleto points out:

The academic career of women is crossed by a series of factors linked to the gender order […] One of these factors is discrimination that undoubtedly responds to the meanings between masculinity and femininity, the latter in turn acting on the collective imaginary - in this case university - as well as on the individual internalisation of these shared images (Buquet-Corleto, 2016, p. 39).

This, of course, is in addition to the conditions of precariousness in which women often find themselves in the social structure. Mary Beard, in her essay The Public Voice of Women, traces this phenomenon back to Homer’s Iliad, precisely in the power relationship manifested in the silence that Telemachus imposes on his mother Penelope when she tries to speak publicly in the absence of Odysseus, the father:

The process is detonated in the first song, when Penelope comes down from her chambers and upon entering the great hall finds a bard entertaining the crowd of her suitors. The song narrates the difficulties faced by Greek heroes trying to return home. She does not find it amusing, and in front of everyone she asks the musician to choose a more cheerful song. Then the young Telemachus intervenes. ‘Mother’, he says, ‘you go to your chambers again and attend to your own labours, to the loom and the spinning wheel […] it is for the men to speak, and for me of all, for I have the power in the house’. And she leaves, back to her room (Beard, 2018, p. 20).

The public voices of women and gender dissidence have historically been silenced by the male voice, which is not only reproduced in the ethos and pathos of a people but has structured much of the dominant thinking in the West and its human being universalization attempts. Of course, this has effects in relation to the place of enunciation that women have had and their struggles to express their voice in public, which remain to this day.

The relationship of power and domination that Telemachus exercises with Penelope is reproduced in practically all areas of everyday life. The university tends to reproduce and strengthen these structures of power, violence and subordination that are inherent to gender inequalities, even when the capacity to respond has recently shown itself to be stronger, as Curiel, Worthen and Hernández-Díaz point out:

We observe the visibility of a student feminist movement that is no longer afraid to point out sexual aggressors and is ‘denormalising’ the patriarchal power relationship that characterises interactions in the university environment, highlighting how incoherent and contradictory it is to be trained as a professional in inequality, discrimination and violence (Curiel et al., 2019, p. 9).

For this reason, the approach proposed here is that of a post-gender education², based on the premise developed by Judith Butler that gender and the way in which its effects materialise in bodies have violent effects on both women and men. In this sense, post-gender education is an education beyond gender, which goes beyond equality between men and women (feminism of equality) and women’s claim for deepening their own identity (feminism of difference), but the possibility of effectively ‘undoing gender’ in order to break with its signifying and normative configuration on people’s bodies and lives:

More important than any presupposition about the plasticity of identity, or even its retrograde status, is queer theory’s opposition to the non-voluntary legislation of identity. […] While queer theory opposes those who wish to regulate identity and establish priority epistemological premises for those who claim a certain kind of identity, it seeks not merely to expand the community of anti-homophobic activism but rather to insist that sexuality is not easily summarised or unified through categorisation (Butler, 2006, p. 22).

A post-gender education is, therefore, a queer education, which can materialise in the possibility of an education without gender or where gender is not relevant. The queer theory developed by Butler, and which is the subject of this article, focuses on the ‘opposition to the non-voluntary legislation of identity’; that is, on the possibility of anyone (any singularity) having the possibility of problematising, criticising and de-subjectivising themselves from all forms of gender assignment, without restricting the possibility of acquiring certain stable configurations of identity at certain strategic moments:

The transsexual desire to become a man or a woman should not be dismissed as merely a desire to conform to established identity categories. […] Although in all these cases there are desires for a stable identity, it is crucial to realise that a livable life requires varying degrees of stability. Just as a life for which there are no categories of recognition is not a livable life, so a life for which such categories constitute an unlivable constraint is not an acceptable option (Butler, 2006, p. 22).

What post-gender education aims to do in the classroom is to create the conditions for a life that is bearable, joyful and powerful without or beyond gender. Butler seeks to go one step beyond the now clear separation between sex and gender, in which the former would have a biological basis, while the latter is a socio-cultural construct. This, for Butler, does not solve the problem, as it continues in the causal logic, in which gender is but a reflection or limitation of sex, that is, there would be a linearity between a sexed body and the generic construction of the subject:

Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first clarifying how they come about through what means? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal or hormonal, and how can a feminist critique appreciate the scientific discourses that attempt to establish such ‘facts’? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a distinct history, or several histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was determined, a genealogy that presents binary choices as a variable construct? Do the apparently natural facts of sex take place discursively through different scientific discourses contingent on other political and social interests? If the invariant character of sex is refuted, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always gender, with the result that the distinction between sex and gender does not exist as such (Butler, 2016, p. 55).

Therefore, gender is not the socio-cultural consequence of sex, but, on the contrary, the very understanding of sex or the sexed body is a construction made possible by the interpretative and comprehensive framework of gender. Where ‘nature’ is seen, it should not be forgotten or overlooked that this ‘seen’ is inscribed in specific historical, epistemological, symbolic and sensitive situations, so that both gender and sex are perspectival:

As a consequence, gender is not to culture what sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural medium through which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is formed and established as ‘pre-discursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface upon which culture acts (Butler, 2016, p. 56).

In this regard, María Lugones adds:

Sex is still assumed to be binary and easily determined through an analysis of biological factors. Despite medical and anthropological studies to the contrary, society assumes an unambiguous binary sexual paradigm in which all individuals can be neatly classified as either male or female. […] despite the fact that about 1 to 4 percent of the world’s population is intersex. That is, this is a population that does not fit neatly into sexual categories where there is no room for ambiguity. […] Assignments reveal that what is understood as biological sex is socially constructed. There are a large number of factors involved ‘in establishing a person’s ‘official’ sex’: chromosomes, gonads, external morphology, internal morphology, hormonal patterns, phenotype, assigned sex, and that which a person assigns to himself or herself (Greenberg, 2002, p. 112). Today, chromosomes and genitalia are part of this assignment but in a way that reveals that biology is completely interpreted and is itself surgically constructed (Lugones, 2019, pp. 21-22).

The hegemonic and violent naturalisation and normalisation of gender categories and representations that have been sedimented throughout history and against which feminist and gender-dissidence movements have historically struggled, are represented as an ‘obvious’ reality based solely on the assignment sustained on the biological determinism of genitality, which limits the imagination and hinders the possibilities of even thinking about alternatives that reconfigure gender structures and relations for novel and emancipatory purposes, away from patriarchal relations of domination.

When these transformative alternatives happen, violent reactions immediately appear, ranging from attempts at public silencing, verbal violence or emotional and physical harassment, to feminicides as a form of ‘corrective’ against those who have decided to occupy a space of political, discursive and ethical dissidence from the body, language and political position outside the pre-established frameworks of the dominant order.

A broad understanding of feminism makes it possible to identify that its struggle for equality and equity does not only have positive effects for women, but also seeks gender, intra-gender and post-gender relations free of violence, something with which the trans and queer theories presented here fully coincide. After all, even with the theoretical and practical differences that the different approaches of feminism and the struggles for gender diversity may have, it is undeniable that they are united by the struggle for a life of dignity and freedom from violence.

In this sense, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s call seems to me fundamental when she warns that ‘the definition I give is that a feminist is any man or woman who says: “Yes, there is a problem with the gender situation today and we have to fix it, we have to make things better”. And we have to make it better between all of us, men and women [intersex, transgender, transsexual and queer people]’ (Adichie, 2018, p. 55).

This perspective puts forward an open, heterogeneous and inclusive vision of feminism. Precisely because, as bell hooks points out in her essay Feminism is for Everybody:

Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. Many people believe that feminism consists solely and exclusively of women who want to be equal to men, and the vast majority of these people believe that feminism is anti-male (hooks, 2017, p. 21).

This error of perspective contrasts with hooks’ vision of a masculinity that can find its own critical spaces against sexism and its effects:

Men of all ages need spaces where their resistance to sexism is affirmed and valued. Without men as allies in the struggle, the feminist movement will not advance. Right now, we have a lot of work to do to counter the deeply internalised idea in the cultural psyche that feminism is anti-men. Feminism is anti-sexism. A man who has renounced male privilege and embraced feminist politics is a valuable partner in the struggle (hooks, 2017, p. 34).

For this reason, taking up Judith Butler’s proposal to ‘undo the restrictive normative concepts of sexual life and gender’ (2006, p. 13), the possibility of a post-gender education is proposed. This raises new forms of subjectivation that challenge and emancipate from the dominant hegemony of gender reproduced, among others, by the educational institution.

3. AFFECTIVE AND EMOTIONAL PEDAGOGY

For this, it will be fundamental to question the dominant pedagogical and educational discourse by recovering the affective and emotional dimension of the human being, since the widely accepted idea of the human being as a rational animal is intimately related to the generic domination of ‘rational masculinity’ over ‘affective femininity’. Restructuring emotions and affections in the realm of the human, will make it possible to propose their inseparable correspondence with reason and logic beyond the binary division of gender, which constitutes the fundamental basis for a new affective and radical pedagogy.

However, it is necessary to begin with some clarifications about what is meant by affects and emotions. Firstly, it is not simply a vindication of the sentimental; that is, it does not focus on the psychosomatic expression of emotions alone. Nor does it refer to a non-rational approach to reality, as if affects were detached from the cognitive-logical character or as a pre-logical dimension of human existence.

Likewise, it does not focus solely on intimate-affective relations, even when the study of emotions and affections involves an epidermal and bodily dimension. To limit it to this dimension would be to reduce its power to the space of the intimate at the cost of losing the public dimension of affects and the sensitive.

Spinoza in his Ethics states: ‘By affections I understand the affections of the body by which the power to act of the body itself is increased or diminished, favoured or repressed, and at the same time the ideas of these affections’ (Spinoza, 2014, p. 105). Our body is folded into the world, therefore, it is inevitable that it affects and is affected by other bodies and other human and non-human lives and even, as Deleuze and Guattari (2010) have shown, by other non-living singularities such as a season of the year, a time of day or a ray of sunlight that increase or decrease the potencies of life.

The philosopher Cecilia Macón understands affects as ‘the capacity to affect and be affected, they are performative and collective instances, and are responsible for questioning a series of key binarisms: reason/emotion, interior/exterior, mind/body, action/passion’ (Macón, 2020, p. 12). It is important to elaborate on some aspects of Macón’s definition, which is in line with the proposal of Sara Ahmed (2019) and Lauren Berlant (2020), who critically analyse the way in which narratives about emotions have an impact on collective experience. Affect and emotion are two dimensions of the same phenomenon which

pose spaces as vast as the atmospheres of collective contingency and as small as the gesture of a lip trembling on the body of a person who feels threatened by the loss of the conditions that have hitherto sustained their fantasy of the good life (Berlant, 2020, p. 51).

This opens up a new space of analysis in relation to affect and its pedagogical and political character. Sara Ahmed describes this collective quality of emotions as ‘emotional contagion’: ‘Emotion itself is what happens: I feel sad because you are sad; I feel ashamed because of your shame, and so on’ (Ahmed, 2017, p. 35). When the pedagogical dimension is added, affects acquire a formative and performative character, whereby affects become transformative actions, where education acquires a liberating psychosocial dimension, as bell hooks points out:

Educating as a practice of freedom is a way of educating that anyone can learn. This learning process is easier for those of us teachers who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our job is not just to share information, but to participate in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. Teaching in a way that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to create the conditions necessary for learning to take place in its deepest and most intimate dimensions (hooks, 2022, p. 35).

A pedagogy of affects does not imply a rejection of rationality but proposes a complex recovery between cognitive and sensory qualities, insofar as the human being and its existential multiplicities are manifested in the body. This is what David Le Breton points out when he states that ‘(T)here is a corporeality of thought as there is an intelligence of the body’ (2010, p. 17). To be sensitive is to be thinking, and vice versa. The human is, therefore, a sentient thinking singularity, and the recognition of this is perhaps one of the most important challenges within education:

Emotional awareness and the expression of emotions must necessarily have a place in the classroom. And yet most teachers prefer not to have tears or any other intense display of passionate feelings in class. What is happening is that teachers simply have not received any training in how to respond constructively when confronted with students who show overwhelming feelings. If we had been taught to value emotional intelligence as part of our profession, we might be better prepared to use emotions skillfully in the classroom (hooks, 2022, p. 104).

In this sense, José María Marina in his article Clarifications on Emotional Education develops the concept of ‘affective phenomena’ to highlight its importance in education particularly focused on emotions and affects: ‘Affective phenomena are those that are related to values, that is, to those aspects of reality that are attractive or repulsive, convenient or harmful, pleasurable or painful, positive or aversive reinforcers. […] They are phenomena related to action’ (Marina, 2005, p. 34). These, in turn, form ‘affective styles’, which ‘are stable ways of responding to situations: shyness, aggressiveness, pessimism, optimism, confidence, distrust, are affective styles’ (Marina, 2005, p. 35).

For Marina, ‘affective phenomena’ have to be worked by affective and emotional education in order to build ethical ‘affective styles’ oriented towards binding responsibility with the world and, particularly, with Others in the common search for dignity. This ethical dimension of the affections in education is fundamental, hence Ethics is precisely the title of Spinoza’s work on affections: existence is affective, relational, binding, sensitive and this implies a being-with or a being-in-common (Nancy, 2001), which is the beginning of an ethical ontology of existence essential for education.

Going back to Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that a post-gender education implies a molecular pedagogy of affects. The main characteristic of this dimension is the production and circulation of desire, not in the psychoanalytic sense of a lack (one desires what one lacks), but in the sense of a micro-political movement that allows one to recognise one’s own singularity related to and affected by other open, dynamic and rhizomatic singularities, that is, heterogeneous and multi-linear.

Spinoza offers a definition of ‘desire’ that is directly related to the affections. In fact, as can be shown in his Ethics, in the section Definitions of the affections, the first thing he defines is desire, which implies that, for Spinoza, it is not only intimately linked to the other affections, but it is actually the most important affection, or at least the one that allows us to understand the others:

Desire is the very essence of man [human being] insofar as it is conceived as being determined to act something by any given affection in him. […] I understand, then, here under the denomination of desire all the efforts, impulses, appetites and volitions of man [human being] (Spinoza, 2014, p. 156, italics in the original).

Desire is then the effort, the movement, the becoming. It is a principle of experimentation and transformation determined by the multiplicity of affects before which the human being is open, vulnerable, wounded. However, it is important to clarify that there is no moral or liberating essence in desire, since it can be affected by both joy and sadness and have absolutely different consequences: ‘Joy is the transition of man [human being] from a lesser to a greater perfection. Sadness is the transition of man [human being] from greater to lesser perfection’ (Spinoza, 2014, p. 157; italics in original). Joy increases the potencies of life, while sadness decreases them. Desire circulates, in the former, as a creative, imaginative, vibrant movement; whereas, in the latter, it can produce hate, fear, anxiety. It can be understood the importance of desire and affect in the classroom, as well as the sad or joyful potencies that, depending on how we engage with students, could be produced.

The desire associated with joyful potencies means a revolutionary becoming at the molecular level, and that is a potency well worth exploring in the classroom:

Desire concerns speeds and slownesses between particles (longitude), affects, intensities and haecceities measured in degrees of force (latitude). […] Desire is never to be interpreted, it is the one who experiences. […] Desire exists only agentic or contrived. You cannot grasp or conceive of a desire outside of a certain agency, on a plane that does not pre-exist, but must be constructed. […] The organisations of forms, the formations of subjects ‘incapacitate’ desire: they subject it to the law, they introduce lack into it. […] Desire is itself an immanent revolutionary process. Desire is constructivist, in no way spontaneous. As all agency is collective, it is itself a collective (Deleuze, 2013, pp. 107-109; italics in the original).

At this point it is important to draw some conclusions which allow us to join desire, affects and emotions to post-gender education. First, when Spinoza speaks about joy and sadness, he points out that they are transitions, they are passages, there is a mutation in continuous becoming. Second, Deleuze explains, desire is constructivist, it is agentic, it is a machinic agency; and, finally, ‘the formations of subjects “incapacitate” desire’, so that when we think of affects and desire beyond the subject, we think of a singularity³ also beyond identity, beyond the organism (not the body) and, therefore, beyond the determinisms of gender. As Maurizio Lazzarato points out:

Individuals and classes are but the capture, integration and differentiation of multiplicity. [Binary sets, like sexes and classes, must capture, codify and regulate the virtualities, the possible variations of molecular agency, the interaction probabilities of neo-monadological cooperation. […] The conversion of multiplicity into classes and the conversion of the thousands of sexes into heterosexuality function both as the constitution of types and the repression of multiplicity, as the constitution of the norm and the neutralisation of the virtualities of other becomings (Lazzarato, 2017, pp. 85 and 90).

In this sense, a post-gender education recognises the continuous becoming, the transition, the passage, the flux (it is trans and queer) of desiring singularities (no longer of individuals or subjects) in permanent construction, beyond any essentialist and determinist attempt to classify, paranoidly, everything that is alive, that is to say, transmuting. This complex process of singularisation implies, in relation to queer, the construction of (transidentity, transgender, transhuman) nomadic and politically monstrous subjectivities (transidentitarian, transgender, transhuman). As Lazzarato writes:

A final difference with subject/work theories concerns the process of the constitution of subjectivity. In neo-monadology, the model of subjectivation is the monster. The cosmological consitutive process can only involve dis-human productions of subjectivity. […] The type - or the individual - is nothing but a stabilisation, a momentary closure of the infinity of monstrosity that each force conceals within itself in its relations with other forces. The model of subjectivation is the monster (Lazzarato, 2017, p. 83).

They are monstrous singularities, trans-queer, because they not only criticise the normative, but also produce in themselves a mutation, a becoming outside the subject and the hetero-phallo-ego-logocentric individual, they are aberrant, ‘impossible’, disproportionate, rhizomatic becomings:

A rhizome neither begins nor ends, it is always in the middle, between things, inter-being, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome has as its fabric the conjunction ‘and… and… and…’. In this conjunction there is enough force to shake the verb to be (Deleuze and Guattari, 2010, p. 29).

The human being is therefore a sentient and desiring singularity.

The molecular and affective character of education implies that the binary structures of modernity previously pointed out by Macón: reason/emotion, interior/exterior, mind/body, action/passion, private/public, micro/macro and, of course, male/female and masculine/feminine are diluted, or at least questioned, by an affective and post-gender pedagogy in its radical molecular dimension.

Affective pedagogy implies a recovery of the sensitivity and emotions that accompany reason. A post-gender education within the framework of radical affective pedagogy requires the recognition of that we are emotionally and bodily relational beings. This is fundamental if we want to put an end to the structures of domination and violence inherent to the binary division of gender that contrasts the masculine-rational with the feminine-affective. Their violent consequences are experienced daily in educational institutions, for which Rita Segato develops the concept of ‘pedagogies of cruelty’:

I call pedagogies of cruelty all the acts and practices that teach, habituate and programme subjects to transmute life and vitality into things. […] I am referring to something very precise, such as the capture of something that flowed errant and unpredictable, such as life, in order to install there the inertia and sterility of the thing, measurable, saleable, purchasable and obsolescent, as befits consumption in the apocalyptic phase of capital (Segato, 2018, p. 11; italics in the original).

Segato emphasises the idea that this is a pedagogy since it aims to disassociate violence from any essentialism; on the contrary, it is about forms of violence learned and incorporated through socialisation and education and reproduced throughout life as ‘normal’ or ‘expected’ actions, thoughts and behaviours. Moreover, as learned forms of violence, they can be questioned, denormalised and thus unlearned. Rita Segato calls this process ‘counter-pedagogies of cruelty’, which are nothing more than ‘affective pedagogies’ that create ‘joyful potencies’, as was pointed out with Spinoza. In this respect, Segato expresses:

The counter-pedagogy of cruelty will have to be a counter-pedagogy of power and, therefore, a counter-pedagogy of patriarchy, because it opposes the distinctive elements of the patriarchal order: command of masculinity, male corporatism, low empathy, cruelty, insensitivity, bureaucratism, distancing, technocracy, formality, universality, rootlessness, desensitisation, limited linkage. […] The historical project centred on things as a goal of satisfaction is functional to capital and produces individuals, who in turn are transformed into things. The historical project of bonds calls for reciprocity, which produces community (Segato, 2018, pp. 15-16).

Counter-pedagogy is an invitation to collective bonding against the production of individual-commodities, to the recovery of sensitivity as a form of relation and folding of the world. It is a call to the rise up of critical corporealities in the face of violence, including gender-related violence, which “includes the main counter-pedagogy of cruelty: bonding, affection, friendship” (Segato, 2018, p. 9).

This means politicising and historically locating those who have taken the floor, especially considering the historical difficulties that critical singularities and corporealities have had in writing, being read and heard. Therefore, it is necessary to critically review the privileged places of enunciation of andro-hetero-ciscentrism, as well as the way in which they are read in comparison to women and the various singular forms of sex-gender expression.

4. PEDAGOGY OF AFFECT FOR A POST-GENDER EDUCATION

It is precisely this exercise that Linda Nochlin undertakes when she poses the provocative question “Why haven’t there been great women artists?”, to which she points out:

In the field of art history, the white Western male point of view, unconsciously accepted as the point of view of the art historian, can and does prove to be inadequate […] perhaps we should see the unstated dominance of white male subjectivity as one element in a series of intellectual distortions that must be corrected (Nochlin, 2020, p. 25; italics in original).

For this article, Linda Nochlin’s recovery does not focus on art, but on the question raised by the author. In the case of education, both in the sciences and in the humanities, something similar happens. When reviewing the ‘must-read’ texts of ‘great’ exponents of the disciplines, it seems then that the extraordinary and creative minds belong to mostly white, heterosexual, cisgender men, while the near absence of women and diverse gendered expressions makes us ask with Linda Nochlin ‘Why have there been no great women educators, scientists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, anthropologists, philosophers?’ So, at best, an effort is made to ‘rescue’ female exponents of the history of the discipline in order to dedicate a ‘special section’ of a course or even a whole seminar exclusively to their review. Contrary to these inadequate responses, Linda Nochlin argues that:

What matters here is that there have been no great and outstanding women [and diverse gender expressions] artists, as far as we know, although there have been some very good and interesting ones who remain insufficiently studied or appreciated; nor have there been great Lithuanian [Nigerian, Peruvian, Mongolian] jazz pianists or great Eskimo [Tojolabal, Vietnamese, Kenyan] tennis players, however much we might wish there had been (Nochlin, 2020, p. 28).

This critical and ironic response states that, under the dominant criteria of genius and greatness, the discourse of art, pedagogy, science and any field of knowledge reinforces itself as an andro-hetro-hetro-cis-centric hegemony. However,

the miracle is, in fact, that, given the overwhelmingly anti-women or anti-black [gay, transgender and queer] odds, so many members of [these] groups have managed to achieve levels of excellence in domains that are the prerogative of white males, such as science, politics or art (Nochlin, 2020, p. 29).

It is about making visible and dismantling everything that is taken for granted in any field of knowledge. This includes education and pedagogy, where most educational theories are historically produced by white, heterosexual, European or American men.

In the field of educational theory, authors such as Pilar Ballarín and Ana Iglesias (2019), Raquel Güereca (2017), Catherine Walsh (2021), bell hooks (2021), Claudia Korol (2017), Lia Pinheiro (2021), for example, have approached these theories from feminist and, to a large extent, decolonial-decolonial and anti-racist perspectives. This implies making visible the epistemic violence with respect to the dominant intellectual production and its recovery in the curricula, as well as the colonial domination in Abya Yala and its strong racist component in the field of teaching and knowledge production.

It is essential to dismantle Nochlin’s own question for all epistemic fields and to ask ourselves who poses the question, from where does he or she pose it, what makes an author or a work (pedagogical, artistic, scientific, philosophical, etc.) ‘great’? Of course, the work of a feminist, decolonial-decolonial and gender-diverse epistemic archaeology is fundamental, but its insufficiency must be problematised as long as the very question posed by Linda Nochlin is not questioned, and as long as the way of approaching the production of knowledge and the power relations that appear to be lacking in women’s thought and in general not andro-hetero-cis-centred in the history of the sciences, the arts and the humanities is not transformed.

For this reason, it is essential to raise the possibility - despite the obviousness that the dominant structures and discourses oppose to any form of attempt to escape from their codifying capture networks - of a post-gender education. With the intention of making visible the difficulties that women have faced in making their way in a preponderantly male institution that is reproduced in all aspects, from the choice of profession, power relations in the classroom, teaching and its gender inequalities, as well as full-time positions both in teaching and research and in relevant administrative positions within the university (Buquet, Mingo and Moreno, 2018); but also with the intention of disarticulating the symbolic, discursive and material structure of those inequalities that are imprinted in the way gender has been constructed and that affect all its singular forms of orientation, (post)identity and expression.

5. CONCLUSIONS. POST-GENDER EDUCATION: THE POWERS OF THE TRANS AND QUEER

It is possible to propose a post-gender pedagogy that would be at the same time trans-queer. By this, I mean an affective education in which subjects are understood as singularities affected by other singularities, that is, the recognition that singularities are transmutant, thoughts transitory and bodies in permanent transformation, as Rosi Braidotti proposes in her posthumanist philosophy:

we might venture the conclusion that the main implication of posthuman critical theory for the practice of science is that scientific laws must be rearticulated around the notion of the subject of knowledge as a complex singularity, affective assemblage and relational vitalistic entity (Braidotti, 2015, p. 203).

A post-gender education would then be post-anthropocentric, affective, relational, trans and queer as it seeks to transcend the idea of humanity based on the subject and reason as the attributes of the dominant human, distancing them to the dominated non-human or dehumanised. Recovering the affects and emotions of the relational singularities that we are will be a necessary step in order to propose a post-gender education. Bodies that feel and think from the affective radicality beyond a dominant socio-cultural production of gender; singularities that are capable of building radical epistemic and affective communities.

This proposal of post-subject singularities vindicates queer bodies, as well as the trans in its sexual and gender dimension, but goes further. The post-subject singularities proposed here imply seeing existence always in transition, which goes beyond the question ‘who am I’ and, on the contrary, poses the question ‘how am I being’, not to answer it but to keep it alive.

A radical affective pedagogy could open the way to a post-gender education, as it makes it visible that the dominant perspective of gender is not insurmountable and that even gender itself as the dominant signifier of the production of subjectivities can be questioned and overcome, since, as long as gender exists, the relations of domination and violence that it historically entails are likely to be perpetuated inside and outside the classroom.

REFERENCES

Adichie, Ch. N. (2018). We should all be feminists. Random House. (2.^a ed.).

Ahmed, S. (2017). The cultural politics of emotions. UNAM-CIEG.

Ahmed, S. (2019). The promise of happiness. Black Box.

Aldana, S., Crisóstomo M., Moreno, I., Vázquez, K., & Vollbert, A. (2021). Workbook. La participación femenina en la sociología clásica. National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Arditi, B. (2010). Politics at the edges of liberalism. Difference, populism, revolution, emancipation. Gedisa.

Badiou, A. (1999). Being and the event. Manantial.

Ballarín, P., and Iglesias, A. (2019). Feminism and education. A common path. Historia de La Educación, (37), 37-67. https://doi.org/10.14201/hedu2018373767

Beard, M. (2018). Women’s public voice. In M. Beard and R. Solnit, Speak out. Men explain things to me/Women’s public voice (pp. 19-54). Antelope.

Benjamin, W. (2016). Book of passages. Akal.

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (2008). The social construction of reality. Amorrortu.

Berlant, L. (2020). Cruel optimism. Black Box.

Braidotti, R. (2005). Metamorphosis. Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Akal.

Braidotti, R. (2015). The Posthuman. Gedisa.

Buquet-Corleto, A. (2016). Gender order in higher education: an interdisciplinary approach. Revista Nómadas, (44), 27-43. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121-75502016000100003&lng=en&tlng=es.

Buquet-Corleto, A., Mingo, A., & Moreno, H. (2018). Western imaginary and the expulsion of women from higher education. Revista de la Educación Superior, (47), 83-108. https://doi.org/10.21500/22563202.5648

Butler, J. (2006). Undoing gender. Paidós.

Butler, J. (2016). Gender in contestation. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Paidós.

Butler, J. (2017, 19 January). Bodies and power reconsidered. The Night of the World. https://nochedelmundo.wordpress.com/2017/01/19/cuerpos-y-poder-reconsiderados-por-judith-butler/

Butler, J. (2022). The power of nonviolence. Paidós.

Curiel, Ch. Worthen, H., and Hernández-Díaz, J. (2019). Discrimination towards women in Higher Education Institutions: notes for urgent reflection. Tequio, 3(7), 3-12. http://www.uabjo.mx/media/1/2019/11/Tequio-7-UABJOa.pdf

Deleuze, G. (2013). Dialogues. Pre-Textos (4.^a ed.).

Deleuze, G. (2018). Cinema III. Truth and time. Potencies of the false. Cáctus.

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2010). A Thousand Plateaus. Pre-Textos (9.^a ed.).

Fals Borda, O. (2009). Una sociología sentipensante para América Latina. Siglo del Hombre Editores and CLACSO.

Fanon, F. (2008). Pele negra. Mascaras brancas. EDUFBA.

Foucault, M. (2011). History of sexuality. The will to know. Siglo XXI. (3.^a ed.).

Foucault, M. (2016). Sublevarse. Catalogue Books.

Freire, P. (1987). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paz e Terra.

Gadamer, G-H. (2007). Truth and method. Sígueme (12.^a ed.).

González-Casanova, P. (1969). Sociology of exploitation. Siglo XXI.

Greenberg, J. (2002). Definitional Dilemmas: Male or Female? Black or White? The Law’s Failure to Recognize Intersexuals and Multiracials. In T. Lester (Ed.), Gender Nonconformity, Race, and Sexuality. Charting the Connections (pp. 102-126). University of Wisconsin Press.

Güereca, R. (2017). Epistemic violence and individualisation: tensions and knots for gender equality in HEIs. Reencuentro. Analysis of University Problems, 29(74), 11-32. https://reencuentro.xoc.uam.mx/index.php/reencuentro/article/view/929

hooks, b. (2017). Feminism is for everyone. Traffickers of Dreams.

hooks, b. (2021). Teaching to transgress. Captain Swing.

hooks, b. (2022). Teaching critical thinking. Green Ray.

Illich, I. (2010). The unschooled society. El Rebozo.

Korol, C. (2017). El diálogo de saberes en la pedagogía feminista y en la educación popular. In C. Korol (Comp.), Diálogo de saberes y pedagogía feminista. Desde el Margen. https://xn--pauelosenrebeldia-gxb.com.ar/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Claudia-Korol-El-diálogo-de-saberes-en-la-pedagogía-feminista-y-en-la-educación-popular-2018.pdf

Lander, E. (2000). A colonialidad do saber: eurocentrismo e Ciências Sociais. CLACSO.

Lazzarato, M. (2017). Politics of the event. Tinta Limón. (2.^a ed.).

Le Breton, D. (2010). Sensitive body. Heavy Metals.

López-Petit, S. (2015). Brief treatise on attacking reality. Tinta Limón. (2.^a ed.).

Lugones, M. (2019). Coloniality and gender. Fusilemos La Noche.

Macón, C. (2020). Foreword: Lauren Berlant: sound, fury (and affects). In L. Berlant, El optimismo cruel. Black Box.

Marina, J. (2005). Precisiones sobre la Educación Emocional. Revista Interuniversitaria de Formación del Profesorado, 19(3), 27-43. https://digitum.um.es/digitum/bitstream/10201/128883/1/03_Precisiones%20sobre%20educacion%20emocional.pdf

Mouffe, Ch. (2014). Agonistics. Thinking the world politically. FCE.

Nancy, J-L. (2001). La comunitat desobrada. Arena Libros.

Nietzsche, F. (2016). La gaya ciencia. Tecnos.

Nochlin, L. (2020). Situating in history. Women, art and society. Akal.

Pinheiro, L. (2021). Diálogo de Saberes en la construcción del conocimiento: aportes de la praxis educativo-política de los movimientos sociales en América Latina. In C. Walsh, Y. Espinosa, I. Illich, M. González, A. Rivero-Borrel, L. Pinheiro, and R. Vera, Aprender sin ataduras. Alternative critiques of the school institution (pp. 105-131). El Rebozo.

Preciado, P. B. (2019). Manifiesto contrasexual Anagrama (3.^a ed.).

Quijano, A. (1999). Coloniality of power, culture and knowledge in Latin America. In S. Castro-Gómez et al (Eds.), Pensar (en) los intersticios. Teoría y práctica de la crítica pos-colonial (pp. 227-238). Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

Rancière, J. (2014). The distribution of the sensible. Aesthetics and politics. Prometheus.

Rodríguez, R. (2019). La mujer molesta. Postgender feminisms and sexual transidentity. Ménades.

Rolnik, S. (2019). Spheres of insurrection. Notes for decolonising the unconscious. Tinta Limón.

Segato, R. (2016). The war on women. Traffickers of Dreams.

Segato, R. (2018). Counter-pedagogies of cruelty. Prometheus. (2.^a ed.).

Souriau, É. (2017). The different modes of existence. Cáctus.

Spinoza, B. (2014). Ética. Gredos.

Walsh, C. (2021). Interculturality, coloniality and education. In C. Walsh, Y. Espinosa, I. Illich, M. González, A. Rivero-Borrel, L. Pinheiro, & R. Vera, Aprender sin ataduras. Alternative critiques of the school institution (pp. 9-31). El Rebozo.

_______________________________

¹ The concept of ‘subject’ is used in a careful way considering the criticisms that post-structuralism has made of this notion and its political and epistemic consequences. In this sense, Judith Butler’s idea of subjection is recovered: ‘Foucault refers to subjection in Discipline and Punish, and this word, as is well known, has a double meaning: assujettissement means both subjection (in the sense of subordination) and becoming a subject’ (Butler, 2017, p. 8). This second meaning implies acknowledging that ‘the subject’ is not a given, but recognises the quality of agency of that ‘subject’, for in ‘becoming’ a subject, it can act on itself to become other bodily and subjective forms than the hegemonically expected ones, which includes, of course, gender or its rupture with it.

² Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (2019) in La mujer molesta. Feminismos post-género y transidentidad sexual, situates post-gender in the feminism of equality that culminated approximately in the 1970s. However, I do not agree with her proposal for the following reasons: without a doubt, the pretensions of the feminism of equality were to free itself from the hegemonic gender relations that oppress women, as the author points out “those currents that have defended the emancipation of women and their equality with men” (p. 37), however, I consider that it does not seek “liberation from gender” (p. 36), but liberation from the oppressions of its socio-cultural construction. Gender is still there, reconfigured, resemanticised, reclassified and largely binary. Equality feminism seeks to undo gender inequality, not “get rid of gender” (p. 38), as the author claims. The least that equality feminism sought to do was to get rid of the female gender, but to denounce its unequal socio-cultural construction in relation to the male gender. There is, therefore, no post-gender here. Again, “getting rid of the [unequal and violent] social construction of gender” (p. 38) is not the same as “getting rid of gender” (p. 38).

³ Deleuze and Guattari point out: “A body is not defined by the form that determines it, nor with a given substance or subject, nor by the organs it possesses or the functions it exercises. In the plan of consistency, a body is only defined by a length and a latitude: that is to say, the set of material elements that belong to it under such relations of movement and rest, of speed and slowness (length); the set of intensive affects of which it is capable, under such power or degree of power (latitude). Only local affects and movements, differential velocities. […] There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, a subject, a thing or a substance. We reserve for it the name of haecceity. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date, have a perfect individuality which lacks nothing, although it is not confused with that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities, in the sense that in them everything is a relation of movement and rest between molecules or particles, a power to affect and to be affected” (2010, p. 264; italics in the original).