Education, Sexuality and Anti-gender Movements in Latin America

DVOSKIN, GABRIEL; ESTIVALET, ANELISE GREGIS

Gender and research

Instituto de Sociología de la Academia Checa de Ciencia

Lugar: Praga; Año: 2021 vol. 22 p. 28 - 44

During the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, we registered an expansive, democratic, and a transnational context in Latin America in gender and sexuality policies. However, this trend is not corroborated in the United States, where the early years of the 21st century were marked by the moral spirit of the Bush administration´s policies. Beyond these differences, a growing interest in gender issues appeared in the 21st century at the social level, both in Europe and in the Americas. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, issues related to gender and sexuality have gained greater relevance. We notice it in the bigger space that they have acquired in the mass media, in the emergence of new social groups that focused their demands on these issues - such as the ?Ni Una Menos? or ?Me Too? movements?, which emerged in South America and the United States respectively - and also in the sanction and implementation of laws and public policies related to these issues (Tabbush, Díaz, Trebisacce, Keller 2020).The circulation of these topics in the public sphere made visible discussions about the material and symbolic inequalities that affect gender differences, which were previously silenced or relegated to very restricted areas. In the first stage, these claims were associated with health issues, cases of abuse or physical violence. However, nowadays there are also aspects of gender and sexuality linked to identity, pleasure and autonomy. Consequently, along with the hegemonic voices of specialists in the field of health, we also find social actors on the public scene from the Social Sciences and Humanities, such as anthropologists, sociologists, historians or educators, as well as political and social referents (Maffia 2016).The great diffusion and repercussion of these issues on the social agenda had as a counterpart the (re)emergence of anti-gender movements. These movements questioned the advances in sexual and reproductive rights achieved in recent decades, as is the case of same-sex marriage in France, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay; the inclusion of sexuality as a compulsory curricular content in different Latin American countries; or the legalization of the abortion (Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay). This opposition presents different particularities according to the country or region in which it manifests or according to the specific issue in question, but the main argument that articulates this type of movement, whether of a religious-conservative or neoliberal nature, is the refusal to allow the State to intervene in people´s private lives (Campana 2020).This argument acquires significant notoriety when the discussion is about sex education in schools. In these cases, the expression "Gender ideology" functions as a sign that condenses a variety of meanings that question and reject the implementation of this kind of politics (Kováts, Poim, 2015). The inclusion of sexuality as a compulsory curricular content in schools opens a series of debates not only about gender and sexuality, but also about the social functions that the school institution must fulfill in modern Western societies.In this article, we analyze the discourses of anti-gender movements, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. The aim of our research is to determine the regularities and specificities of these movements in the region. Specifically, in this research, we analyze the representations that are mobilized in the political sphere about gender and sexuality and the role that is attributed to the school institution in these topics. To do this, we analyzed the parliamentary debates that took place for the treatment of the bills of Escola Sem Partido (ESP), in Brasil, guided between 2014 and 2017, and of Interrupción Voluntaria del Embarazo (IVE), in Argentina, in 2018. We chose these debates because they both put in the center of the stage the role of formal education in gender surveys in society. We analyze the regularities that appear from revealing which themes are subject of debate, which social actors are constituted as legitimate to address these themes, which are the enunciation device that shapes and the arguments that underlie their postures. On the other hand, the expression ?Gender ideology? was widely disseminated in the mass media of communication and social networks once these debates were ended (Dvoskin, Estivalet 2020), so we consider them as a determining factor in the conditions of possibility for its social circulation.We consider Discourse Analysis as a useful framework to inquire into the ideological contents that circulate socially (Fairclough 1992; Wodak, Meyer 2001). The analysis of the discourse of anti-gender movements in Brazil and Argentina lets us know the characteristics of this movement in Latin America and how it is linked to the network of movements of this type that circulate in the northern hemisphere