From margin to center: A reflective itinerary for an epistemology of gender (in)justice and a feminist pedagogy

Violence against women is taking the form of a real femmigenocide that is being perpetrated globally (Segato, 2023), a “war against women” that can no longer be interpreted as individual episodes of the private sphere but as the result of a systemic patriarchy and a “mandate of masculinity” (Segato, 2015) that has its roots in the Enlightenment and Colonial culture. Deprivation of violence against women leads to questioning the relationship between gender, race and class in intersectional discrimination (Crenshaw, 1989), with a focus on the need to bring attention to the attempt to “outsource” of violence against women by the mainstream and the link that exists between colonialism and verticalization of relationships in relation to internalized sexism (Hooks, 2021) that, transcending the man-women, demonstrates the formative significance of the patriarchal model and the need to problematize the dichotomies and the ideology of gender. To bring out the complex oppressive structures that descend from the patriarchal model, we must follow a pathway that, with a reflective mode (Nuzzaci, 2011), takes us from the margin to the center (hooks, 2023), from the attempt to understand the motivations of violence to the constructs sedimented to trigger a process of awareness (Freire, 2004) in the new generations. Promoting a feminist pedagogy, the proposal is to base pedagogical actions that bring citizenship back to the center as a practice of belonging to the context of life and as a practice of expanding the possibilities and conditions because oppressed people within the patriarchal colonial structure (men and women) can re-appropriate the center, acquiring agencies to act to transform the structures of thought and sexist power. For this reason, it is necessary to give substance to the word, a word capable of describing the state of marginalization and oppression and that can reflexively bring out the relationships of power to give life to alternative visions of justice and good life (Benhabib, 2019).

Keywords: ; Gender justice; Gender violence; Patriarchy; Feminist pedagogy; Decolonial pedagogy

Cristina Boeris, Federica Matera, Dal margine al centro: un itinerario riflessivo per un’epistemologia dell’(in)giustizia di genere e una pedagogia femminista in "EDUCATIONAL REFLECTIVE PRACTICES" 1/2024, pp 190-207, DOI: 10.3280/erp1-2024oa18300