Conference Program

School curricula are never neutral. The selection of texts, genres, and knowledge forms that enter the classroom is always an act of power – one that legitimizes certain ways of knowing while rendering others invisible. Drawing on the frameworks of queer pedagogy and epistemic justice, this paper argues that traditional school curricula in Italy operate as normalizing technologies that systematically marginalize non-canonical forms of cultural production and non-normative subjectivities. In doing so, they reproduce what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls epistemic injustice: a form of harm that silences subjects by denying legitimacy to their ways of knowing and narrating the world. This silencing is not accidental but structural, as bell hooks (1994) reminds us when she frames the classroom as a potential site of liberation – one that is, however, too often organized around the reproduction of dominance rather than the affirmation of plural voices.

The paper focuses on three interconnected domains that remain largely absent from official school curricula: comics and graphic novels, queer themes and identities, and alternative or non-mainstream writing addressed to adolescents. Each of these areas represents not merely a gap in literary provision, but a structural exclusion that reflects deeper epistemological assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge, aesthetically valid form, and culturally worthy content. As Apple (2004) has argued, the official curriculum encodes a particular version of cultural hegemony; what is left out is as revealing as what is included. Schirripa (2020) further situates this dynamic within the Italian context, showing how critical pedagogy must contend with institutional inertia and the persistence of conservative curricular frameworks that resist the inclusion of subaltern knowledges.

Comics and graphic novels, despite decades of scholarship attesting to their cognitive and narrative complexity (McCloud, 1993), continue to be treated as peripheral or subliterary within school reading lists. Their absence is symptomatic of a broader logocentric bias that privileges the written word in its most traditional forms. Queer themes and identities remain largely invisible in school settings, where heteronormativity functions as an unmarked default – a silent norm that shapes what can be said, read, and imagined within institutional walls. As Giroux (2024) argues, schools are not simply sites of instruction but of cultural production, where certain identities are rendered legible while others are pushed to the margins.

For queer adolescents, this exclusion is particularly crucial: it forecloses access to narratives and imaginaries through which non-normative selves might be recognized and validated (Kumashiro, 2002; Sedgwick, 1990).

Mayo (2024) further highlights how critical pedagogy must actively confront heteronormativity as a form of epistemic violence, rather than treating sexuality as a private matter exterior to the political work of education.

This paper contends that the exclusion of these forms from school curricula is not incidental but constitutive: it reproduces what Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe as the “colonial matrix of power”, which operates through the control of knowledge and aesthetic value. Decolonizing the curriculum means, therefore, not simply adding marginalized voices to an otherwise unchanged structure, but fundamentally questioning the epistemological hierarchies that govern curricular legitimacy.