Políticas de identidade como um dispositivo contemporâneo na educação.

Abstract

This dissertation is situated within the field of Education and post-structuralist studies, emerging from concerns about how identities are formed and how inequalities become rooted in society and in schools. The research problematizes identity policies not merely as instruments of recognition or legal inclusion, but as political technologies and devices for governing difference that operate upon race, gender, and sexuality. The study presents the Brazilian educational landscape between 1994 and 2024, a period marked by the institutionalization of discourses of diversity and, simultaneously, by conservative and neoliberal reactions. In this context, the objective was to analyze how identity policies, understood as device for governing subjectivity, are articulated in normative documents of Brazilian basic education published between 1994 and 2024, in order to produce educable subjects, organize and hierarchize differences, and establish regimes of truth concerning race, gender, and sexuality within the school context. The research is theoretically and methodologically grounded in a post-structuralist perspective, employing analytical tools derived from Michel Foucault, such as device, governmentality, and regimes of truth. The corpus consisted of two analytical blocks: a normative political block, composed of federal laws, guidelines, resolutions, and official opinions published between 1994 and 2024, and an academic-scientific block, based on ANPED’s scholarly production as an analyzer of the materiality of research. The analysis interpreted these documents as practices of government that define diagnoses, risks, and prescribed forms of conduct. The findings demonstrate that identity policies operate as a device that captures demands for social justice and redistributes them into administrable forms of diversity, establishing shifting boundaries between inclusion and exclusion. While recognizing historical inequalities, these policies simultaneously reinscribe subjects within bureaucratic and moral array of control. The school thus emerges as a site of dispute between a democratic rationality of recognition and a neoliberal rationality that converts difference into either risk or human capital, requiring the included subject to perform self-government, resilience, and normative adequacy. It is concluded that identity policies constitute technologies that produce governable subjects and regulate school relations according to a logic of security and efficiency.