Education and hetero-cis-normativity: the discursive production of human sexuality

Abstract

The problematic around the construction of sexual identities in our culture constitutes, at present, an issue that deserves to be discussed and reviewed from a critical position, so I will take up again some discussions of feminist theory: the reflection on the process of political-cultural organization of sexuality and its discursive production as well as the construction of gender in sexist and hetero-cis-sexist societies. The present text, in this way, responds to the importance -and to the personal/professional interest/desire- of naming the forms and nuances that human sexuality adopts after having denied them for a long time; hence I maintain as a fundamental premise that to deny sexual identities is to deny the diversity with which human nature expresses itself.

In this sense, I will try to show the way in which hetero-cis-normativity is presented to us - since before birth - as a conditioning that assumes the once and forever determination of human sexuality, and that confession - particularly linked to the process of normalization of compulsory heterosexuality - appears in modernity and in our contemporary societies as a "ritual of truth production" (Foucault: 2018); that is, as a discursive mechanism for the disciplining of bodies, for the control of ways of being and being-and consequently, of experiencing sexual identity, desire, the body, pleasures-in social life.

In short, the central idea is that hetero-cis-normativity constitutes the fundamental element for the assumption that all people, by common sense, are feminine and masculine and that, uniformly, the binary system of sexes acts as the foundation for the discursive definition - as part of such naturalization process - of sex, gender, sexual orientation and gender expression.