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

• In Event: Space, Affect and Education: Historicizing the Production of Differences

Proposal

In this paper, I will delve into the gendered and affectual dimensions of what Post-revolutionary educational reformers in Mexico understood as the “Rural problem.” Novel approaches to scholars of curriculum and the history of education have centered space and emotions by analyzing school building as a tool for reformers to manage, control, and foster specific emotions in students and teachers (Dussel, 2019, 2021; Norlin, 2018; Sobe, 2018). However, in the case of the expansion of mass schooling in Mexico, educational authorities and reformers also focused on larger territorial concepts, like ‘the city’ and ‘the countryside,’ theorizing how they could affect students through the emotions they produced.

This spatial division can be understood as what Michel Foucault calls a milieu (Foucault, 2007). Unlike disciplinary power that targets the body through the construction of enclosed space (like Bentham’s panopticon or the school building), milieus operates at the scale of governmentality, producing spatial projects centered on population dynamics like epidemics, reproduction, and migration through urban, regional, and landscape planning. I argue that post-revolutionary Mexican reformers created rurality as a milieu and schools as a central technology to modernize it through fostering and managing particular affectual states.

I explore the assemblage of rurality in the official archive of the Ministry of Education in Mexico through a genealogical approach. Rather than extracting facts and data from the archive, I focus on problematizing the technologies and practices of visualization, the ordering principles, and the theoretical assumptions that produce rurality as an affective space (Foucault, 1977, 2002; Stoler, 2002, 2010). I use sources, like school inspector reports, maps, tests, and even the murals at the Ministry’s headquarters, to analyze how school authorities observed and described the affects of rurality—namely roughness, tiredness, and slowness—and held schooling as a fundamental tool in modernizing peasant subjectivity.

In these sources, the emotions of isolation, exhaustion, and the lack of sensory impulses in the countryside are deemed the reason for peasant’s unmodern gender relations and, as a consequence, for the underperformance of their children in schools. In order to improve the educational outcomes of their children, reformers sought to transform this emotional environment had so that peasant women could adopt a model of selfless femininity defined by motherhood and domesticity, and peasant men embraced a rational but tamed form of masculinity.

In sum, I argue that the production of rurality as an affectual space played a fundamental role in the post-revolutionary school that sought to introduce urbanized notions of masculinity, femininity, and the heterosexual nuclear family as central components in the modernization of peasants and their children. In this sense, spaces themselves, rather than just subjects, were described by educators as producing particular gendered and intimate expressions, turning the city into a modern, femininized environment that could transform the rough masculinity of peasants that resulted from the environment of rurality.

Author

• Marino Miranda Noriega, UW-Madison