Conference Program

Affective and sexual education represents one of the fields in which the persistence of the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007) most clearly manifests itself within contemporary educational institutions. Despite formal references to rights, respect for differences, and the promotion of well-being, school-based dispositifs often continue to reproduce a heteronormative, binary, and Eurocentric vision of the body, the family, and citizenship, inscribing young subjectivities within normative frameworks that hierarchize desires, relationships, and forms of life.

Drawing on the dialogue between queer pedagogy and decolonial studies, this contribution critically interrogates the pedagogical genealogies of affective and sexual education in modern schooling, showing how they have historically been constructed as an integral part of the colonial project of modernity. From this perspective, the body is not merely an object of education but a political dispositif through which symbolic boundaries are produced between normality and deviance, legitimacy and marginalization, full citizenship and conditional citizenship.

The paper proposes an intersectional rereading of sexual education as a space for the production of governable subjectivities, highlighting the connections between racialization, sexuality, gender, and class within curricula and teaching practices. Through the analysis of institutional documents, educational guidelines, and teaching materials, it shows how the centrality of the heterosexual model, the nuclear family, and binary sexual difference continues to implicitly structure educational pathways, marginalizing queer, trans*, migrant, and racialized experiences.

In dialogue with critical pedagogy, public pedagogy, and the perspective of epistemic justice (Collins, 2019), the contribution explores the potential of a decolonial approach to affective and sexual education, capable of recognizing situated knowledges, embodied narratives, and youth agency as pedagogical resources. Decolonizing affective and sexual education thus entails not only expanding curricular content but radically transforming educational epistemologies, shifting the focus from the normalization of bodies to the valorization of plural desires, relationships, and forms of belonging.

The aim is to redefine affective and sexual education (hooks, 1994) as a democratic space of participation, recognition, and co-construction of plural citizenships, in which subjects can critically negotiate the power dispositifs that traverse their bodies and lives. In this sense, pedagogy is configured as a political practice of liberation, capable of challenging the colonial legacy of education and opening educational possibilities grounded in social justice, desire, and the dignity of all forms of existence.