A diferença como valor humano: Ensaio sobre as contribuições do pensamento de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze e Homi Bhabha para o Paradigma da Inclusão

A diferença como valor humano: Ensaio sobre as contribuições do pensamento de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze e Homi Bhabha para o Paradigma da Inclusão Resumo: A economia e a particularização marcam a sociedade contemporânea como importantes vetores para a ampliação das desigualdades sociais e produção de variados mecanismos de exclusão social. A diferença é parâmetro para categorizar e apartar pessoas à invisibilidade social. O presente ensaio tem como objetivo o diálogo junto aos autores Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze e Homi Bhabha e seus respectivos pensamentos como contributores para o entendimento da diferença como valor humano no contexto do paradigma da inclusão. Nos caminhos e entre-lugares da descolonização de nosso ser, é preciso desnaturalizar as barbáries produzidas pelo colonizador e aceitar as diferenças como próprias da espécie humana para a (re)invenção de nossa educação e sociedade.Palavras-chave: Inclusão. Diferença. Educação. Descolonização. Apoio: CNPq DIFFERENCE AS HUMAN VALUE: Essay on the contributions of the thoughts of Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze and Homi Bhabha to the Inclusion Paradigm Abstract: Economics and particularization mark contemporary society as important vectors for widening social inequalities and producing various mechanisms of social exclusion. The difference is a parameter to categorize and separate people to social invisibility. This essay aims to dialogue with the authors Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze and Homi Bhabha and their respective thoughts as contributors to the understanding of difference as a human value in the context of the inclusion paradigm. In the ways and places between the decolonization of our being, we must denaturalize the barbarism produced by the colonizer and accept the differences as proper to the human species for the (re)invention of our education and society.Keywords: Inclusion. Difference. Education. Decolonization. DIFERENCIA COMO VALOR HUMANO: Ensayo sobre las contribuciones de los pensamientos de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze y Homi Bhabha al paradigma de la inclusión Resumen: La economía y la particularización marcan a la sociedad contemporánea como vectores importantes para ampliar las desigualdades sociales y producir diversos mecanismos de exclusión social. La diferencia es un parámetro para clasificar y separar a las personas de la invisibilidad social. Este ensayo tiene como objetivo dialogar con los autores Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze y Homi Bhabha y sus respectivos pensamientos como contribuyentes a la comprensión de la diferencia como un valor humano en el contexto del paradigma de inclusión. En los modos y lugares entre la descolonización de nuestro ser, debemos desnaturalizar la barbarie producida por el colonizador y aceptar las diferencias como propias de la especie humana para la (re)invención de nuestra educación y sociedad.Palabras clave: Inclusión. Diferencia. Educación. Descolonización. Data de registro: 21/09/2019Data de aceite: 22/07/2020

Valued Contribution and Social Invisibility in Ecuador

Chapter 6 illustrates the empirical application of the social invisibility component of the invisibility bargain in Ecuador, showing how race, gender, and other markers of difference structure host society expectations of who belongs in the “community of value.” Using an intersectional lens, it teases apart the overlapping structures of exclusion that affect indigenous and Afro-Colombians, other Colombian migrants, and Afro-Ecuadorians quite differently in their access to human security and social integration in Ecuador. The chapter highlights accent as the primary marker of difference that heightens the social visibility of Colombian migrants, and it traces the coping mechanisms—including minimizing difference, reducing social distance, and informal negotiation through intermediaries, that migrants use to avoid the social sanctions of backlash under the invisibility bargain.

Hyper(in)visibility and urban-mediatic populism in São Paulo: a sociosemiotic approach

The aim of this article is to tackle the sociosemiotic strategies through which the relation between power and visibility is articulated in today’s metropolitan São Paulo. Drawing on the theoretical-methodological framework of Greimasian and post-Greimasian semiotics, the following hypotheses are put forth: (1) contemporary São Paulo is characterized by a true visual hypertrophy, which manifests itself, all at once, in both its architectural and mediatic landscapes; (2) in São Paulo, power is hypervisible and apparently transparent; (3) the excess of images, gazes, and perspectives produces, in São Paulo, dense and wide areas of topological, mediatic, and social invisibility; (4) the predominant visibility in São Paulo can be qualified as a “populist” visibility. Based on these assumptions, this article intends to contribute to the consolidation of a critical debate on the visual matrices of power and on social processes of exclusion and inclusion currently in place in global metropolises. Likewise, it is intended to contribute to the elaboration of a theoretical-methodological framework capable of understanding and addressing the complexity of the phenomena that characterize such debate.

“Darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures”: the panoptical gaze in Sarah Waters’s "Affinity"

The aim of this essay is to analyse Sarah Waters’s novel Affinity (1999) from the perspective of the panoptical system of surveillance, based on the controlling power of the gaze, that was widely employed as a system of represión in Victorian society. It seeks to explore Milbank prison as a perfect example of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s ideas about punishment and imprisonment. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s notion of scopophilia, the essay goes on to explore the characteristics of the interaction and mutual attraction felt by two of the main characters, with the aim of proving that the gaze can be a powerful weapon to subjugate another person. Finally, it tackles the relevance of the third protagonist, Ruth Vigers, a lady’s maid whose job makes her invisible both to the readers and to other characters in the novel. The analysis shows that it is precisely her social invisibility that allows her to escape the gaze of this panoptical society and become the master puppeteer controlling everything from the shadows.

How Non-Heteronormative Mothers Negotiate Meaning: Experiencing and Contextualizing “Invisibility”

This article aims to shed light on how non-heteronormative mothers—whose child had been conceived via artificial insemination of one of them with the sperm of an anonymous donor— decode, experience, and make meaning of diverse (symbolic) dimensions of their social invisibility, as well as how their understandings of the category at hand have an impact on projecting and negotiating their roles as mothers (especially in case of those women who did not give birth to their children). Drawing on specific examples from the field, I analyze how—while acting within the context of anxiety exemplifying their non-existing legal status—non-heteronormative mothers construct the image of self against the backdrop of no ready-made role scripts available, as well as strive towards making oneself (socially) visible. The insights at hand are based on data collected during my six-year ethnographic study of planned non-heteronormative motherhood in Poland, where same-sex relationships are not legally recognized.

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

Traveling with the Team

This chapter focuses on the lived experience of the wives who travel with their husbands during the MLB season and the unwritten code of conduct that establishes the wives’ subordinate status by ensuring their social invisibility. It describes how the players, sport organizations, and the wives themselves use code work to construct, apply, and reinforce the code, and how couples who question the code—called code busters—can reap negative consequences even when the husband enjoys high-level team status. It discusses the importance of code enforcement as a means of maintaining the husband’s standing among teammates, establishing the expectation that teammates will cover up each other’s sexual activities, including the extramarital relationships of married players. Finally, it explores how traveling wives, who are also expected to keep the men’s secrets, become aware of an implicit competition for their husband’s loyalty.

The Presence of the Colonial Past: Equatorial Guinean Women in Spain

This article analyses the causes and consequences of the sociocultural discrimination and exclusion of Equatoguinean women in Spain. The starting premise is that a notable familiarity with Spanish culture (language and religion) as a former African colony and a long period of settlement in Spain that dates back to the 1940s should have favoured greater social advancement of this group. However, the fieldwork shows that they have been held back by the marginalised position of Equatorial Guinea in Spain's current collective imaginary of its colonial past, as well as by the socio-laboural precariousness they have experienced since their arrival. Based on the body of thought of postcolonial theory, and from a predominantly anthropological and historical standpoint, this article analyses the heavy burden of social invisibility and unequal economic opportunities that these women carry. The paper concludes that migrant memories must be incorporated into the Hispano-African narrative to create a more trustworthy account of the shared Spanish and Equatorial Guinean past, and that there is an urgent need to implement policies in Spain that promote equality regardless of ethnicity, race, and gender.