We received a couple of book reviews through the FedIcaria mailing list that may be of interest. On the one hand, very much in the orthodox Foucaultian line to which the people of FedIcaria have accustomed us, Genealogy of sex education in contemporary Spain. Origins (1800-1920) by José B. Seoane and published by Octaedro, adds to the discourses that investigate the invention of childhood and the control devices that have shaped childhood subjectivity, focusing on the moment when childhood sexuality becomes an object of study and problematization differentiated from adult sexuality. On the other hand, in Educating the gaze. Politics and pedagogy of the image compiled by Inés Dussel and Daniela Gutiérrez and edited by Manantial, FLACSO and OSDE in Argentina, you can find studies on representations and social imaginary or visual culture, understanding the gaze, as stated in the review, both as an act of knowledge and as a political act. We agree with that.
The complete reviews after the link:
Seoane, José B.
Genealogy of sex education in contemporary Spain. Origins (1800-1920) , Octaedro, Barcelona, 2006.
With a certain delay on the scheduled date, a book has just been published that excellently summarizes an excellent doctoral thesis, directed in its day by Francisco J. Vázquez García, one of the most reputable adapters in Spain of the Foucaultian genealogical method. One as another take sexuality as a thematic vein, and explain the reason (the reasons) that hides behind the passion.
Seoane’s book is also part of the intellectual production context of the Education history and criticism collection, which, directed by Juan Mainer and protected by the Nebraska Project of Fedicaria, is very open and very sensitive to critical and genealogical approaches.
It could be said that this new work in the collection is part of a critical chain that will continue with one of its next titles (I am referring to Rafael Huertas’ book, The laboratories of the norm: medicine and social regulation in the liberal State), and whose links are so many pieces of historical criticism of the reasons of liberal reason in the era of capitalism. Whether it is school, sexuality or medicine, they are questioned, they are pointed out as contingent human creations, the social control apparatus both in the biopolitics of classical liberalism and in the more subtle and renewed biopolitics of our time.
The book reconstructs the plot of discourses with pretensions of scientific truth and ethical plausibility that limit the new childhood subjectivity, mainly in the constitutive stage of national education systems, in that phase that I usually call the traditional-elitist mode of education. To this end, the author divides his work into several chapters: the first is the most generic (Origins of the sexual device of childhood); while the remaining develop concretions of such device in various educational fields (Urbanity and the new codes of modesty and intimacy; School hygiene: the debate on sex education; Childhood sexuality in the treatises of Pedagogy; Physical education: how to correct children). A final chapter (A genealogy of the present: old and new problems of sex education) serves as a problematizing recapitulation of the whole topic addressed.
This last recapitulation seems to me the least achieved of the text. It shines with intensity and extraordinary information in the historical part of each of the chapters (the time span goes from 1800 to 1920). Although, in my opinion, this periodization does not obey too rigorous reasons, it is, on the other hand, indisputable the enormous interest of each and every one of the topics treated and of the sources used (medical, legal, pedagogical, literary, religious and others). Here the historian of education can enjoy the discovery of an authentic deposit of discursive resources and legitimizing rhetoric housed in manuals and other cultural artifacts that circulate or prowl around the school space. The book is, therefore, to a certain extent, a historical dissection of a facet of school knowledge, so often forgotten in the history of the school. So forgotten and so obliquely present, because the negation of desire becomes, after the enlightened reason, in axial category of all systems of transmission of knowledge and patterns of behavior. Sexuality, its absence and presence, constitute, shaped as discourses and practices of socialization, a transversal issue that allows us to make history of ourselves and of the institutions that have shaped our subjectivity. Always, of course, that a certain and frequent anti-Foucaultian prejudice of some researchers is banished or put in parentheses, the historians of education and especially those of childhood must find in a book like this a treasure of suggestions, ideas and empirical data
Raimundo Cuesta
Dussel, Inés; Gutiérrez, Daniela (comps.), Educating the gaze. Politics and pedagogy of the image , Buenos Aires, Manantial – Flacso – OSDE, 2006.
As the compilers of this book warn, the image is today one of the most widespread modes of representation (…). However, reflection on how the gaze is formed and what it produces has little presence in the cultural and pedagogical discussion, and even less in the educational practice. In order to reflect from different perspectives on the pedagogy of the gaze and on the existing links between words and images, an international seminar was held in June 2005, with the theme that gives title to the book, organized by FLACSO/Argentina and the OSDE Foundation. The result of this seminar are the nineteen works included in this book grouped into three sections:
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