Faggots at school: racism and homophobia in the life and education paths of black teachers

Abstract

This article discusses issues related to the teacher development of black/queer teachers in the Sertão do São Francisco territory between the states of Bahia and Pernambuco. The (auto)biography is configured as a central device in the adopted perspective because it reveals the place of the intended understandings. Thus, the research subjects produced narratives about their life paths through (auto)biographical interviews, where, without structured scripts, they were invited to talk about themselves and how they became teachers. Narrating is, in this text, a political/scientific gesture of inscription of our presence in the world, for it enables us to understand reality in different ways, by questioning and triggering memory. Events, places, and people build the narrative plot about being a homosexual, a black person, or a teacher. In this methodological perspective, knowledge is produced in the experience of what is lived by the body that says itself in the world in a biographical temporality. We are interested in how racism and homophobia are present in these trajectories.