Thematizing Heteronormativity. An Historical-Pedagogical Reflection on Sexual Education in Costa Rica

Abstract

The article aims to expose heteronormativity as a not-often-spoken-of pedagogical objective of public schooling. Accordingly, the article offers an analysis of the movement of mothers and fathers against the Programs of Study for Education on Affectivity and Sexuality of the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica, as of the interpretations, demands, and claims of high school students from a public school in San Carlos. In the light of theories of social reproduction, “gender fatalism” will be discussed as an ideological configuration rooted on the double negation of the historicity of the sexual division of labor and the centrality of reproductive work in capitalism. The defense of «traditional family» will be understood as a response to the incremental abandonment of the State of its commitment with the reproduction of life in neoliberal capitalism. It finishes by arguing for the necessity for sexual education to recognize the historical contingency of heterosexuality as a political institution, as a means of eroding fatalist dispositions in terms of gender.