HETERONORMATIVITY: SCHOOL, IDEOLOGY, AND POLITICS

• Authors: Metka Čeplak-Mencin
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article analyses discomfort about sexuality expressed in formal education. It draws on the Foucault’s analysis of sexuality as a privileged object of bio-politics (the object of regulation, surveillance, and discipline) and the most instrumentalized element in power relations in the Western world. Related to this is also the pedagogization of child sexuality, which even today is still characterized by ambiguities and discomfort. The author concludes that silence about non-hetero-sexualities and the bio-medicalization and physicalization of (homo)-sexuality are the most common and obvious symptoms of discomfort about (homo)-sexuality in Slovenian schools. These manners of treating sexuality are usually interpreted as neutral, but the author interprets them as strategies of conflict avoidance which in fact support a heteronormative social order and (implicitly or explicitly) even legitimize the exclusion of all who cross the boundaries of the ‘normal heterosexuality’. They strengthen prejudice, motivate ignorance, and it can even be used as an excuse for violence. The article points out that education does not provide a magic formula since it cannot foresee its own effects due to the complexity of the social relations and the nature of the education process (e.g. Millot, 1983).

Keywords

EN

SEXUALITY; GENDER; SEXUAL NORMS; HETERONORMATIVITY; DISCOMFORT; SCHOOL; EDUCATION; SLOVENIA

• Publisher: Faculty of Education, Trnava University
• Journal: Pedagogický časopis (Journal of Pedagogy)
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 162 – 187

Contributors

author

Metka Čeplak-Mencin

• University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, Kardeljeva pl. 5, Ljubljana, 1000, Slovenia