Regulation and emancipation at school

the case study of a young woman’s identity process

Abstract

This article shared the case study conducted in master’s research, whose objective was to understand the identity process of young white women, former students of elite private schools, in the city of São Paulo, where the psycho-pedagogue works. Conceiving identity as a continuous process that occurs throughout the individual’s history in relation to the socio-historical context, we sought to identify identity references produced and reproduced in the daily lives of these institutions. The qualitative method of “interviewing narratives and future project” of a young woman’s life story was used based on the premise that the singularity of the narrator materializes the universal, in the particularity of what is narrated. The analysis of the interviews made it possible to understand the identity process based on the narrator’s experiences and the re-lationship established with her surroundings. The school practices experienced revealed themselves as regulatory identity policies, that is, as totalizing identity references, which impose a unique model of being, individualizing and pathologizing the failure of those who did not fit in. The imbalance that led to this student’s illness is the result of countless invisible tensions, ignored in the endless search to maximize results in the name of belonging to a world of performance in an exhausted society, producing exclusion to sell inclusion. It can be said that the narrative enabled the understanding that educational policies are constituted as regulatory identity policies, preventing possibilities of identity – metamorphosis towards human emancipation and revealing the need to expand the investigation with a larger universe.