Gender, Intimacy, and Emotions in the Educational Problematization of Rurality in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

• In Event: Histories of International Education: Social Justice, Identity, and Decolonization

Abstract

In this paper I analyze the desires and anxieties in the post-revolutionar representation of rurality as an affectual, gendered, and educational space. I explore the representation of rural emotionality using reports from rural school inspectors in the 1920s and 1930s and the representation of peasant life in muralism. On the one hand, the desired image of a peasant and gender in muralism centered on selfless femininity and rational masculinity. However, in the reports, the lack of sensory impulses in the countryside is deemed the reason for the underperformance of peasant children in school. Reformers used psychological theories to advance the idea that the countryside did not foster the "urban feminity" necessary to educate their children as modern national subjects.

Author

• Marino Miranda Noriega, University of Wisconsin - Madison