Education as a Battlefield in Latin America: Gendered Disputes from Classrooms to Campuses

Abstract

This panel examines education and knowledge institutions as key sites where gendered violence is legitimised, administered, and resisted across Latin America and the Caribbean. It approaches violence expansively, capturing not only physical harm but the coercive governance of bodies and sexuality through censorship, moral panic, surveillance, and the strategic omission of gender and sexual diversity from public curricula and policy. Anti-gender mobilisation in schools and national education planning is analysed alongside the everyday pressures that shape teachers’ discretion in politically polarised environments, revealing how the threat of denunciation can operate as a form of institutionalised intimidation. The panel also extends the lens to universities and science policy, where the privatisation of care and the marginalisation of motherhood expose how democratic inclusion is distributed within ostensibly meritocratic spaces. By linking curriculum battles to girls’ everyday negotiations of control and respectability, the panel argues that education policy is a struggle over whose safety matters, whose autonomy is constrained, and which harms are made speakable.

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