The Pedagogy of/in Images Notes on lesbian desire and knowing how to fuck

GUTIERREZ, MARIA LAURA

Queer Epistemologies in Education Luso-Hispanic Dialogues and Shared Horizons

Palgrave Macmillian

Lugar: New York; Año: 2020; p. 81 - 96

This article brings together feminist, lesbian and queer studies in visual culture, asking how images ? especially, erotic images ? con-struct norms for bodies and desires, and how well-represented and representable these desires may be for young people at various levels in the education system. Here we focus on lesbian experi-ences, yet we are not interested in reifying a particular identity; ra-ther, we seek to draw on their capacity to raise political questions that, where they intersect with queer theory, project not an essen-tialized identity but its vanishing points. I?m writing from my own experience as a lesbian activist, someone who gives talks on Educación Sexual Integral, or Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) and who has been asked over and over again: "How do lesbians have sex?" Faced with this question, I find myself wondering what need for a confession of otherness is interwoven with these doubts and avowals of (wilful) ignorance? What bodies and images populate, in the words of val flores, "CSE´s sexual reveries" (2018)? How might images form a possible pedagogy for the intelligibility of bodies of knowledge? What moans and sighs are apt to answer how do lesbians have sex? in a context where once again sex has been lumped in with risk, danger and prevention, with childhood and adolescence used as a screen to render our erotic practices invisible and violently take young people´s heterosexuality for granted?The second series of questions addressed here concern the possi-bility of exploring sexual imaginaries in the face of a reactionary conservatism egged on by stories of sexual panic ? panic allied with a punitive morality that, largely but insistently, relapses into criticism of those affective and sexual associations that give the slip to norms of el buen coger (?best sex practice") and apparently "respectable dissidence". What can we do with images of our own feminist and lesbian movements when they conjure up repressive and stringent imaginaries based on the moral and sexual ideas of het-ero/homonormativity, and so make identity a violent and exclusive biological transparency?To sum up, I?m not seeking to make a case for why goodly lesbian sex should be more visible, or present it as limpid and unambiguous; it?s more a question of the politicity of a queer and non-essentialist gaze rolling out the potential imaginaries of these experiences