Flash ethnography and story-telling booths: interruption of educational sites for the approximations to discourses around sexual diversity

Abstract

The so called sexual diversity has become a political and academic, novel issue in the last ten years in Mexico, particularly that which regards to LGBT identities, thanks to the organizational force of these identities, that inform being victims of constant homophobic violence. These forms of violence occur frequently in schools, an issue that make a rigid regulatory framework on the body, sexuality and gender very evident, and where formal educational has a central role. In this paper, we report the experience of a group of researchers from different generations, cultures and countries on the use of an experimental and novel methodology that provokes interruptions—pauses—in schools. This method consisted of introducing a sound-proof booth (a wooden artefact of two meters, by one meter, by one meter) into schools, into which one could enter to “tell a story on sexual diversity”, be it individually or collectively, that would be registered by a videocamera or audiorecorder. The booth remained in each school for two weeks, during which we developed participant observation and interviews. We called this flash ethnography, due to its short duration and intention of interrupting the school’s everyday life. In this text we reflect on the implications of this method, as a pause for the sites in which we worked and for ourselves. A pause that allowed to re-establish the pedagogical, sexual and affective logics, norms and politics of each site, that provided opportunities to tell typical and dissident stories on what is conceived as sexuality and sexualdiversity in schools. Another relevant effect was the constitution of an us as an other to each site, something that constituted us as vulnerable, but privileged to carry out observation.