Dossiê - estranhos... abjetos... cobiçados... construídos: corpos, desejos e educação

Abstract

The proposal of this dossier came from my circulation as a member of several academic places for the production and dissemination of research on Education, especially in the Work Group 23 of the National Association of Post-Graduation and Research in Education (Anped)–Gender, Sexuality, and Education –, and at the Brazilian Association of Homo-Culture (ABEH). In such meetings, I realized that more and more, in different academic milieu, in research, in the media, in advertisement, in training courses and in the preoccupations concerning the educative processes, there is a proliferation of discourses and practices that construct the bodies. The very idea of construction is recurrent, which makes these actions of body investments to be contradictory, sometimes paradoxical, but also full of power relations, pleasure, desires, so that we must also mention investments that are celebrated, making it possible to classify discourses and practices as enthusiastic. Thus, we may say that the knowledge of the body, about the body and with the body is the result of investment, confrontation, negotiation, and historical processes, always related to the desires, fears, concerns, dreams of each place, moment, culture, and social group. Weird, abject, coveted, constructed: bodies, desires, and education is a dossier that seeks to operate with these assumptions, making room for different configurations and the functioning of Western societies which invite us to explore these constructions and appreciations which speak of these societies and which change them, putting under suspicion the educative processes of individuals, taking them as temporary and contingent.