Learning to transgress: the intersectionality of high school occupations

Abstract

This article is the result of collective research on secondary school occupations led by young students in 2016. Our goal in this work is to reflect on secondary school occupations in public schools as a “transgressive” political experience. To this end, we rely on a qualitative research methodology based on semi-structured interviews with 80 occupiers from ten Brazilian states and data production using MaxQda software. We assume intersectionality as an epistemological basis, but above all, a methodological one, investigating the struggle for existence and institutional transformation. We analyze educational reforms in terms of oppression at the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal levels, linking the demands, formative processes, and emergence of leaders in the movement with the ideas of bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins on the transgressive potential of education. We conclude that the occupations can be considered an intersectional movement, as they mobilized demands related to class, gender, and race/ethnicity and anchored formative processes that sought to overcome the oppressions and asymmetries that shape everyday school life and the educational system. Finally, the transgressive nature of the movement is attributed to the fact that the occupations formed a praxis, a didactic-critical exercise that enabled the emergence of new affections based on the appreciation of differences.