How does school built male? Critical ethnography on rituals of masculinization in the school scene

Abstract

This article, product of a doctoral research in science education, proposes a critical ethnographic work that articulates the queer and feminist pedagogies to display a constellation of records and argumentative levels that allow to illuminate a cultural configuration of devices and technologies which guide the institutional processes of masculinization. It is evident, as well, the complicity between the family and the school in relation to the psycho medical frame which is installed as common sense and, in this way, as a single parameter of intelligibility to define the male and the female and chart a genital description of the bodies that allows the naturalization and a hierarchy of different modes to become men and women during the school transit.The series of scenes that are set out in the ethnographic story corresponds to a moment of cultural transition in Argentina linked with changes in paradigms of rights driven by laws enacted thanks to the battles of different forms of political activism in recent years: from a law that ensures the full protection of rights of children and adolescents (2005) and a national integral sex education program (2006) that seeks the equal treatment and opportunities for men and women (2000), until the new reform of the civil marriage that ensures connections regardless of the gender of their marriage (2010) and the Law of Gender Identity (2012). This way, a reflexive challenge appears to adapt the educational practices to the new paradigms of rights in the pedagogic scene.