Introduction²

In August 2021, I submitted a research project with no institutional funding called “Educational Necro-politics based on formative itineraries projected by transvestites-transexual-transgender sex workers and/or whores in Jardim, MS”. The duration of the project was planned to be two years; the first year (Aug/2021 to Aug/2022) would deal with the survey on the scientific production of transvestite, transexual and transgender researchers in diverse areas of knowledge. The team (teachers and students in the research group) worked with different authorships, discussed different ways to do research, problematized innumerous theoretical approaches and how they promoted the construction and creation of knowledge from the localization of those bodies within the current social and educational context. From there, the debate on the objectification of bodies by researchers from different research institutions arose. This was because transvestites, transexuals and transgender people did not have a space in important research institutions because of transphobia.

We searched for the concept of objectification and found some conceptual concerns in philosophical studies. This occurs when we are the instruments of satisfaction and consumption of other people, placing us in a situation where our humanity is denied. This is what happens when authorships conform to the association between objectification and dehumanization. We could not do the same.

There was a need to move away from these traditional concepts that came from the field of other consolidated sciences (natural and exact sciences) and technical-instrumental rationality that remove us from the subject-universe we tend to study in the Humanities. This objectification was not carried out by transvestite- transexual-transgender researchers or by trans researchers. Mostly, it was observed that this was done by cis researchers who took on an impartial role when dealing with the instrumentality of scientific knowledge and considered their interlocutors to be objects in a laboratory (the different events in their lives). This is not the place - though it is not through lack of courage - to name names, institutions, etc. due to academic integrity.

I would like to illustrate this discussion with the preface by Letícia do ^{Nascimento (2022}, p. 8) to a text called Cutucando o cu do cânone: insubmissões teóricas e desobediências epistêmicas [Poking the asshole of the canon: theoretical insubmission and epistemic disobedience]:

[...] I would like to poke the sacred recipe books of universities, those colonial curriculums [...] I envisage a transvestite science and, hence, a whore and marginal science. I am not only a gender pirate, the deepest side to my work is also to pirate, smuggle theories [...] To poke at the canon is to think of other possibilities from and beyond the canon. It also means to thinks without the canon. It also means to bring those thoughts beyond the canon to the canon.

A transvestite science cannot communicate with transvestites in the traditional way we learned to do research, which objectifies the human being. During the second year (Aug/2022 to Aug/2023) of our research, the idea was to collect the school experiences of transvestites, transexuals and transgender people that prostituted themselves in front of the college building where I was working as an educational training instructor for the Geography Teaching major at the time. Even with the approval of the Ethics and Research with Humans Committee, we would be facing numerous difficulties from the perspective of researchers. But not as interlocutors. I am referring to our discussion on objectification during the first year of the research. Although we were lesbian, gay and heterosexual researchers with an interest in transvestite and trans themes, we could create genuine vulnerabilities if due diligence were not given. After all, we occupied - and still do - privileged positions because we were not immediately seized by transphobic gazes. We could satisfactorily pass in several places where we were not known, since they were normative.

We did everything as expected in the research project: we read and signed the free consent form for research, made invitations with no strings attached, took the recorder and collected information about our interlocutors. It was a complete failure. Nothing we did worked. In the beginning, they would say yes, but later, everything became very difficult. Access to them was difficult. However, when we stopped to think about why, we realized that nobody likes to relive terrible memories about violence or hostile treatment. It was concerning to think about the effects of accessing memories of events that could be connected to a feeling of failure accentuated by the policy of meritocracy, so widely predicated in the official speeches given in our country.

The proposal of the project was to expose schooling projections that had worked out and those that hadn’t. These educational proposals often were connected to projects of happiness and professional accomplishments. However, people who do not construct themselves according to parameters of moralization and biomedical normalization deal with daily experiences of being relegated to the cellars of the impossible, to torture, cruelty, violence. With the immensity of the suffering before us, we came out of this experience certain that we should not objectify our interlocutors. The approach should be done in the opposite direction: approximation, empathy and, later, an invitation to participate in a discussion with the study group. To bring them into an environment they had never imagined being in before. We began to think about other strategies to possibly reveal what we were planning in the implementation of theoretical discussions. We saw in research with a documental and bibliographical basis that there were other ways to communicate knowledge about schools as places that do not support educational projects of happiness and professional accomplishment when they do not adopt anti-lgbt-phobic educational practices.

Guidance for scientific initiation, final undergraduate essays and master’s thesis, research groups, teaching and outreach projects, these are some activities that are the social raison d’etre of a university. The use of these spaces in the university lead us to a problem: does science assertively communicate with subjects whose localization point escapes the moralistic effects of parameterization for being, existing and thinking?

I have raised the issue of the experiences of transvestites, transexuals and transgender people without reducing them to the condition of being trans, which many studies have done, to emphasize the aim of this study: to problematize scientific practices to stand against the objectified use of subjects of diversity. In terms of theoretical-methodological approaches, we adopted decolonial, non-normative epistemes that propose the use of disobedient and insubmissive practices to categorize different scientific methodologies and practices that go counter to the effects of normalization without losing the focus of the scientific and ethical integrity of research in education and diversity.

To this end, theoretical-methodological perspectives of authors whose social identities are far from the universe of references predefined by normalization processes (white, heterosexual, average purchasing power, married, Catholic) were addressed. The proposed movement goes in the direction of the value given to disobedient, insubmissive and radicalizing subjectification practices that are seen as dirty from the gaze of the hetero-terrorist male power parameter.

This text is divided into three parts: 1) Science; 2) disobedient, insubmissive and radical methodologies with 3) a backdrop of the possibilities of scientific meditations of the black researchers bell hook and Meg Rayara. However, I would like to point out the many others who coexist and create other possibilities in science: Jota Mombaça; Tertuliana Lustosa; Viviane Vergueiro. In this text, I am interested in those who exchange ideas with the field of education.

Science

Science. At first glance, a word that seems simple. However, it generates an effect in meaning that triggers subjects, images and, above all, the feeling that its focus is inaccessible for certain existences whose localization is not seen as producing intelligibility. There are certain social groups that do not see themselves as producers of knowledge due to the elitization of the concept of science. In this case, I understand intelligibility based on ^{Butler (2015}), as the historical and cultural schemes that define the dominions of what can be known about something.

Many cannot understand how science is a space to which, one day, their existence may converge. There are abysses and borders imposed that forge distances instead of adding and joining. Nevertheless, its is paramount that we problematize this. What do we do with the traditional practices of research that insist in designating undergraduate and graduate teachers as the reproducers of literature reviews and bibliographic research without the authenticity of their authorship?

To this end, we must destabilize the traditional practices in science without having to be characterized as Europhobic and/or reproducers of academic fads in the same way renown Brazilian researchers have done in the area of research on education when they speak of non-Marxist studies in national and international events. When they speak with the intention of attacking, they do not fulfill their role as critics of the lack of scientific and academic integrity of these great (or not so great) cistemically trained researchers.

This statement is not a mere point of view when we observe that, truly, it represents the absence of ethical, scientific and academic integrity that are the main obligations that should be demanded from our faculty, the indispensable elements for the sound practice of research. From these first problematizations, I would like to highlight the researchers who question the materiality of terms in traditional science. This does not mean that there is an intention to refuse the traditional parameters of science since what precisely allowed one to bring up some of the affirmations found in this text were numerous observations seen in speech and discourse that delegitimize different ways to do research. The observation initially disclosed in discourses of scientific methods have their own value as shall be presented in this text.

However, the idea is to join with other readings and give them the status of scientific validity. ^{Chizzotti (2003}), in an introduction to a text about the evolution of research in the Humanities, points out that the most used approach in this area is qualitative. There is a recognition, hence, of the transdiciplinarity of this field in the use of approaches that are able to explain reality and access the truth about a problem or subject in research “[...] by adopting multi-methods of investigation to study a phenomenon in the locus where it occurs and, finally, trying to both find the significance of this phenomenon and interpret the meanings that people give them ” (^{Chizzotti, 2003}, p. 221).

^{Chizzotti (2003}) refers to the evolution seen in the number researchers who, although familiar with the conventional ways of doing scientific research, have used non-conventional theories, more participative methods and techniques to collect data and, most importantly, facilitate their protagonism as part of the process: “The evolution of this type of research, marked by ruptures more than cumulative progress, contains subjacent theoretical tensions which gradually moves it away from one-and-only theories, practices and strategies of research” (^{Chizzotti, 2003}, p. 222).

To characterize the advances made by qualitative research, ^{Chizzotti (2003}) mentions five relevant marks to understand the changes in the field of Humanities: 1) the demand for an autonomous and comprehensive methodology (end of the 19th century); 2) anthropology is differentiated from history (middle of the 20th century); 3) consolidation of the qualitative research field after World War II as a research model (1970s); 4) new topics and issues related to class, gender, ethnicity, racer, cultures bring about new theoretical and methodological issues to qualitative studies (1970s and 1980s); and, finally, the author says 5)

[...] The social position of the author of the research, the descriptive all-presence of the scientific text, the objective transcription of reality are questioned: researchers are marked by social reality, every observation has a theory, the text does not escape having a position in the political context and objectivity it is marked off by the subject’s engagement in the reality surrounding it (^{Chizzotti, 2003}, p. 230).

A little over 20 years ago, this author underlined the tendency to use new theoretical-methodological input with the aim of instructing new, future researchers engaged in their positions and social reality. In this sense, place is relevant as the point from which knowledge is produced or generated. With this, research has historically been related to colonialism and with what more recently is understood as coloniality. The latter, because it is long-lasting, continues to operate on our subjectivity. To understand the connection between scientific totalitarianism and coloniality, we must first contextualize the concept of coloniality.

^{Quijano (2009}) states that the idea of coloniality has been an important constitutive and specific element in the parameter of the capitalist world power. It originates and globalizes starting in America and is sustained by the invention of the concept of the racial/ethnic classification “[...] of world population as the cornerstone of this parameter, operating in each one of the material and subjective planes, medias and dimensions of daily social existence and societal levels (^{Quijano, 2009}, p. 73).

Scientific totalitarianism, according to ^{Mignolo (2004}), is related to the concept of coloniality since knowledge is also racialized and has theological bases. Certain subjects were restricted from the power to create knowledge and do research. In this case, they felt the pain of epistemic oppression. According to what ^{Mignolo (2004}) states, this occurred due to the superiority of science and the ways of producing knowledge in the West, which placed the rationality of knowledge in languages that were not vernacular versions of Greek and Latin (Italian, Portuguese, French, German and English) in doubt.

[...] Science (knowledge and wisdom) is not separate from language; languages are not mere ‘cultural’ phenomena in which peoples find their ‘identity’, they are also a place in which knowledge is inscribed. And, since languages are not something human beings have but something human beings are, the coloniality of power and knowledge has generated the coloniality of the being (^{Mignolo, 2004}, p. 669, quotation marks by author).

Mignolo (2204) mentions the work Black Skins, White Masks by ^{Fanon (2008}) to confirm his idea of scientific totalitarianism and coloniality of knowledge and the being since Fanon wrote his text from his localization as a black man who lived in a country colonized by France, Martinique. Fanon’s final undergraduate essay was not accepted because it did not use formats or knowledge production that were specifically within the parameters of European power. When analyzing the place the black individual occupies in relation to language, Mignolo’s (2004) connection between language and science in the constitution of the coloniality of being is brought to mind.

[...] Every colonized people - meaning every people in whose bosom an inferiority complex arose due to the burying of its cultural originality - takes a position before the language of the civilizing nation, i.e., of the metropolitan culture. The more there is an assimilation of the cultural values of the metropolis, the more the colonized individual will escape from its jungle. The more it rejects its blackness, its forest, the whiter it will be (^{Fanon, 2008}, p.33).

As the objects of study in terms of traditional science, black people are a part of different scientific racist discourses within the historical context of great renown works in science, as ^{Mignolo (2004}) illustrates well when referring to Kant’s oeuvre, for example. Often they are portrayed from a racist, white-centered view that places them in a condition of non-humanity or without any positive characteristics in different periods. To be seen as subjects endowed with humanity, they would have to understand themselves as being white, as ^{Fanon (2008}) points out about hallucinatory whitening. Thoughts such as these led ^{Fanon (2008}) to confirm that the ontological being does not address the black individual because it is in a zone of non-being and of the sub-human:

[...] Ontology - once it is finally admitted that it leaves existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must.be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him. (^{Fanon, 2008}, 104)

Hence, ^{Mignolo (2004}, p. 670, author’s quotation marks) states that the celebration of the Scientific Revolution was seen as a triumph of modernity “[...] parallel to the emerging belief in the supremacy of the ‘white race’”. With this definition of science, other forms of creating knowledge that diverged from the model proposed by the modern Scientific Revolution became discredited and discarded. This is what happened in our country if we take the example the entire process of Portuguese colonization experienced by enslaved people: indigenous and black people. Because they were understood as being sub-human and inferior, these social groups were not seen as being able to generate knowledge and specific cultural practices.

There is a need to consider a new paradigm for investigation and analysis, as proposed by ^{Mignolo (2004}) when we discuss local theorizations that distant from what is considered the center of knowledge, Europe. Non-European epistemologies also have scientific validity, such as seen in the feminist bases of reading reality that question modern science as being not only erected upon racist, but also patriarchal and chauvinist views. This helps us understand the dynamics of the locus occupied by the scientist in generating knowledge.

^{Maldonado-Torres (2008}) referred to this issue when discussing the problem of the absence of reflectivity on the part of Western philosophers in relation to spatiality and the unquestionable geopolitics of European dominion over the production of knowledge. The author, however, states that we are in danger of introducing spatiality with the limitations of reproducing a neutral epistemic subject. The belief in the distance of the observer can contribute to impartiality and, hence, reproduce blindness “[...] not in regard to space as such, but in regard to the non-European forms of thinking and the production and reproduction of the colonial/imperial relation or of what, following the work of Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, needs to be called coloniality” (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2008}, p. 73).

When reading the theories of Heidegger, ^{Maldonado-Torres (2008}, p. 79) deduces that this author also brought about epistemic racism when speaking of the ontology of the being:

His racism is not biological nor cultural, it is epistemic. The same as in all forms of racism, the epistemic is related to politics and sociality. Epistemic racism disregards the epistemic capacity of specific groups of people (^{Maldonado-Torres (2008}, p. 79).

The author is calling our attention to this so we can deal with this Western amnesia that has placed subjects who are different from the colonialist parameter of being in situations of extermination, destruction and invisibility as a justification for modernity.

The coloniality of being, according to ^{Maldonado-Torres (2007}, p. 130), can be understood through the work of Frantz Fanon: “Ese es el punto a partir del cual Fanon comienza a elaborar lo que pudiera considerarse como el aparato existenciario del sujeto e producido por la colonialidad del ser”. In this sense, understanding the coloniality of being is linked to a modern and colonial reality that inferiorizes people and place them in a non-human or sub-human condition, as explained by ^{Fanon (2008}). This leads people in this situation to believe they are not creators of knowledge, or able to understand in the conventional terms used by science.

[...] El surgimiento del concepto ‘colonialidad del ser’ responde, pues, a la necesidad de aclarar la pregunta sobre los efectos de la colonialidad en la experiencia vivida, y no sólo en la mente de sujetos subalternos. De aquí que la idea resonara tan fuertemente en mí, que estaba trabajando la fenomenología y la filosofía existencial, así como las críticas a tales acercamientos desde la perspectiva de la sub-alteridad racial y colonial (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2007}, p. 130, author’s quotation marks).

There is a relation between knowledge and power, between being and knowing which the author states we must keep constantly questioning. To this end, we must fight the logic and linearity that European sciences have imposed on the way we address knowledge as a sum of observed data, quantified and analyzed. Decolonial theory hence proposes a critical view of scientific presuppositions of “[...] time, space, knowledge and subjectivity, among other key-areas of human experience, allowing us to identify and explain the ways in which colonized subjects experience colonization [...]” (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2020}, p. 29).

By questioning and aiming to destabilize perspectives of traditional scientific practice from the center of discussions, the goal is to disturb the heroic narrative, the fallacy of the discovery of peoples who need civilizing processes, and enslavement interpreted as a means to discipline primitive peoples. This allows one to destabilize concepts that have been culturally imposed on and instilled in us as essentialist, natural and belonging to an unquestionable order. This practice can help prevent individuals who radically question the cis-heteronormative - white - Christian order to be seen as pathological, vengeful beings who are the cause of reverse discrimination (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2020}).

In another study, ^{Maldonado-Torres (2016}) starts a discussion on the concept of transdiciplinarity and decoloniality. In regard to acknowledging this discussion for the area of education, it is necessary to point out that in the field of educational research, generally we choose to deal with methods of information collection and analysis with resources taken from other areas of knowledge. This does not delegitimize or invalidate the forms of generating knowledge on a focused event. We need to take the necessary precautions with scientific integrity to avoid vulnerabilities that may compromise the answers obtained.

When searching for another science, ^{Maldonado-Torres (2016}) indicates the need to reflect and think of a decolonizing praxis in the scientific field: the concept of epistemic decolonization. According to the author, the ethnic and African-American studies that appeared in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s represented significant changes in the scientific field, albeit with strong resistance from the white-European university format reproduced in said country.

As a decolonial attitude of confrontation towards positivist science, ^{Maldonado-Torres (2016}) highlights that ethnic studies proposed dismantling forms of power that, through practices that dehumanized certain social groups, especially indigenous, black and Latinos, acted upon the formative consciousness of being and knowing of these populations so they would not have any type of social and political mobility:

[...] Decolonial consciousness entails ways of acting, being and knowing that are nourished by the meetings held among these areas [...] The border-like quality of decolonial thought also points towards it transdisciplinary quality; the decolonizing project and attitude leads the cognizant subject that emerges from the zone of not-being to feed on activism that is social, artistically creative and related to knowledge (in some cases also spiritual) and is on the way to revealing, dismantling and overcoming the ontological, modern-colonial line (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2016}, p. 94).

According to the author, the border-like quality between what is imposed and what escapes the images of control that are imposed challenges traditional conceptions of being, knowing and power. The simultaneity of these encounters generate experiences that challenge cis-heteronormative-white-Christian systems of scientific practices, allowing the emergence of a new orientation of an emancipatory praxis through science. It means to recognize that the admittance in the scientific field of subjects who previously were not seen in academic-institutional spaces brings new practices and new knowledge that help us think about methods, analysis strategies and results stemming from investigations.

^{Streck and Adams (2012}) sought to present the contribution of the epistemologies of the South, of Boaventura de Souza Santos, to give critical-investigative actions epistemologically-based contributions that historically were invisible and subservient epistemically. These authors understand that these processes set us, as a nation with a recent process of independence, as reproducers and imitators of the models predefined by countries that believe they are ahead, in terms of development, of colonized countries.

The authors problematize the degree of knowledge that we have about these strategies of generating knowledge and education by authors who are not located in European or North American countries. Validating research practices based on the epistemologies of the South can contribute to better conditions to address our demands with what we have at hand for thinking about real social changes and transformations.

To indicate the importance of a problematization that aims at southerning scientific practices with epistemologies that are proper to our location, ^{Streck and Adams (2012}, p. 245) analyze participative involvement with social movements and popular education to highlight other investigative practices: “[...] towards the discussion of a research method that is coherent with an education that, based on a posture of an epistemology of the South, challenges coloniality and contributes to expanding emancipatory paths”. This stems from the fact that we still face the remnants of the roots of epistemic subservience in which “[...] hegemonically, within and without academic environments, the paradigm of Eurocentric modernity prevails and is set (and accepted) as the parameter of a knowledge that has defined itself as superior and universal, with the ensuing declassification of the knowledge of the South” (^{Streck & Adams, 2012}, p. 247).

The authors used the experiences of Orlando Fals Borda’s (1925-2008) with participative research and research-action from the 1960s in Chokonta, Colombia; and that of Paulo Freire (1921-1927) in the 1960s in Angicos/RN, Brazil. According to these experiences, ^{Streck and Adams (2012}, p. 246) propose to understand what they call a methodological turn: “The collective, dialogic and emancipatory dimensions of the investigative process, and not only of its potential results, are a historical mark of what we have named a methodological turn”. This methodological turn, according to the authors, anticipates the promotion of resistance and reactions towards the colonial maintenance of an epistemic cultural matrix. It is a choice for theoretical-methodological resources that unreservedly use emancipatory practices that are committed to processes of social change and transformations with elements of our localization in the global south.

It is implicit that any epistemology adopted in a study is the result of relations of power and disputes. Helplessness and inferiority become concrete feelings for subjects that have been dehumanized before the cogwheels of how the modern Western intellectual productivity found in scientific practices work: “By demystifying the ideological content in this relationship, southernizing implies in the commitment with the struggle for the emancipation of colonized peoples ” (^{Streck & Adams, 2012}, p. 248).

As an example of the experiences that could southernize the scientific field, the authors mention the philosophy of the pre-Colombian Abya Yala people:

[...] Contrary to traditional Greek philosophy - characterized by the dichotomies between interior and exterior, transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporary, essential and accidental, universal and particular, material and spiritual, mundane and divine -, Andean philosophy is based on principles of relationality, correspondence, complementarity, cyclicality, inclusivity and solidarity (^{Streck & Adams, 2012}, p. 249).

Knowing about dialogic experiences such as what was mentioned above can help break away from imposed conventional forms on how to do science. The bodies that produce other types of experiences are at odds with the determinate capitalist, gender and sexuality parameters. This means that, if they are subjects who have their own recognized practices, these models can destabilize the models of scientific parameters.

When subjects who are considered sub-human and occupiers of the non-being zone begin to occupy normativized spaces such as universities and important research centers, they begin to wallow in the trash they have been given as an existential space. This metaphor is pertinent because it represents a place of denial, inferiorization and dehumanization. However, this place also creates consciousness and knowledge. It touches the raw nerve of inequalities and demands, with encouragement, and in name of lost lives, better spaces and new forms of life and dignity: “This is a mediating research of educational and emancipatory processes through the involvement of all the participating subjects, along with the collective reflection and resultant impact on praxis” (^{Streck & Adams, 2012}, p. 254).

The present study proposes to go through the same path proposed by ^{Streck and Adams (2012}). However, instead of using the participant praxis of the social and popular educational movements, we shall explore the self-criticism, presence and social localization of bodies that are historically made invisible by the effects of dehumanization as generators of methods, scientific practices and knowledge. These bodies are cis and trans black women who, by being present in their texts, act beyond a participative and observing praxis - they act from a political position in defense of an education that is a part of a life and survival project.

Disobedient, insubmissive and radical methodologies

To contraband the theories of being disobedient, insubmissive and radical is associated with the proposal made by ^{Mignolo and Veiga (2021}, p. 28, authors’ quotation marks):

[...] my argument does not proclaim originality (“originality being one of the basic expectations of modern control of subjectivity), but seeks to contribute to the growing processes of decoloniality around the world. My humble statement is that the geopolitics and the body-politics of knowledge have been omitted from the selfish interests of Western epistemology, and that the task of decolonial thought is to reveal the epistemic silences of Western epistemology and to assert the epistemic rights of the racially undervalued and the decolonial options that allow the silences to build arguments to confront those who take “originality” as the highest criteria for a final judgment.

Instead of advancing through pre-established parameters, the proposal of this study is to raise divergence to think about research practices. The act of writing in the first person singular or plural in scientific writing can be seen as a form of encouragement. Besides this, at times, it can be a strategy of scientific recording contrary to the idea of ground zero, as ^{Mignolo and Veiga (2021}) explain about the exercise of de-westernization of thought in the search for a geography of reasoning.

To be present in a text, above all, to give up the power to decide which space you will have in a scientific journal, of texts in continuous flow or a simple point of view, in itself, materializes the terms of a traditional, excluding science and which, in no way, is not a match for non-conventional existences. However, I agree with Glória ^{Anzaldúa (2021}, p. 58) that writing is a form of resistance and survival, for it “[...] is in writing itself that our survival can be found, since a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared”.

I will refer to Anzaldúa’s life because the author learned to see herself as strange, like an extrinsic vision, something produced externally: “[...] in other people’s eyes I saw myself reflected as strange, abnormal, queer. I could not see other reflections” (Anzaldúa, 2021, p. 67). This social vision produced as strangeness due to its differences was enabled because of her social demarcation as a body with the characteristics of a Mexican person with indigenous ancestralities. From this image of control of a being that caused uncanniness in another country, one can evoke questionings about inequalities, processes of dehumanization and violence used for national supremacy.

Disobedience, insubmission and radicality … terms associated with people whose images of social control were taken to the concept of sub-ontological difference, as portrayed by ^{Maldonado-Torres (2008}): LGBTI+; black people, indigenous peoples, these are the groups mostly empowered by the anticolonial feeling to pressure, manifest themselves, fight, cause trouble, make a scene, etc. These practices are seen as antiscientific or a nuisance because they no longer act with the male-heteroterrorist-white-Christian courtesy that is so widely valued in the scientific field.

At this point we are discussing the epistemic agency denied to people who were, through essentialist policies regarding gender, sexualities and race, classified as being inferior. ^{Mignolo (2008}) addresses Anibal Quijano’s proposal that it is not enough to merely criticize the modern rational model and its categories, it is necessary to break loose from these attachments as a project that involves destroying the coloniality of world power. With this debate, Mignolo (2008) states that we are facing the first signs of reorientation towards and epistemic unleashing through a decolonial option that is radically in opposition to one of the accomplishments of imperial reasoning, which “[...] declared itself a superior identity by creating inferior constructs (racial, national, religious, sexual, gendered) and expelling them from the normative sphere of the ‘real’” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 291, author’s quotations).

The decolonial option involves

[...] thinking from the outside and in a subaltern epistemic position vis-à-vis the epistemic hegemony that creates, builds, erects an outside to assure itself of its interiority [...] thinking from languages and categories of thought that are not included in the foundations of Western thought. Once more, Greek, Latin and (please repeat after me…!) (^{Mignolo, 2008}, p. 304-305).

Intellectual work developed with a decolonial option as a basis, according to ^{Mignolo (2008}), helps us learn and unlearn and learn and relearn. The use of epistemically insubmissive methodologies in relation to what is configured as universal theories and methods in scientific knowledge in research on education articulates theories, epistemologies and identity in politics. Insubmission as a resource for political positioning in research attacks what has become routine in the scientific field, an enunciation with no localization and no subject, as the myth of scientific neutrality has taught us.

This dominant European and North-American-based strategy engendered an idea of a superior knowledge and an inferior knowledge. Unlearning to hide behind the practice of scientific research demands a reorientation of the formative processes on research in education as a field that involves the use of theories, methods, and different forms of generating non-European knowledge. Furthermore, we must unlearn that involvement with research does not necessarily interfere with reading the research material as science.

Ângela ^{Figueiredo (2017}) states that this unlearning process goes beyond taking on a decolonial position in the production of knowledge: it involves the constant problematization of who the producer of knowledge is, the localization of this subject who says it is responsible for thinking or that sees itself in a central and unimaginable place of respect as to scientific knowledge.

When looking at her scientific training, ^{Figueiredo (2017}) saw herself standing upon a solid sexist, chauvinist and colonized basis. To relearn coherence between theory and practice, the author saw the urgency of deconstructing two great myths of science: the disconnection between production of knowledge and political interest and the supposed neutrality in generating knowledge.

[...] Hence, black researchers have not only historically been at the margins, but also are still mostly treated with suspicion, since the proximity to the theme and the political perspective found in the studies are often an argument used to disqualify the intellectual production of black people because they are too close to the object and, therefore, supposedly, do not have the necessary neutrality and objectivity to analyze a social phenomenon they are a part of (^{Figueiredo, 2017}, p. 89).

The use of insubmissive, radical and disobedient scientific practices is a form of identitary-political action in research that confronts the alleged white-researcher subject who acts on behalf of an abstract universalism, the concealment of the locus of enunciation, endowed with the privilege of saying the ethereal truth (^{Mignolo & Veiga, 2021}). Unlearning the universalist forms of research and the concealment of the locus of enunciation is a feeling of aversion to the coloniality of power and knowledge that excludes us from the process. This leads us to thinking that research cannot reveal the place of enunciation or political identity of a black person, a transvestite, a quilombola, etc. Being radical in unlearning this practice is to place oneself in search of part of the political body that is positioned as privileged to be constructing knowledge, which is the case of white people.

Unlearning, for Luiz ^{Rufino (2021}, p. 19), “[...] is a political and poetic act in contact with what bears itself as the only knowledge possible or as the greater knowledge when compared to other kinds of knowledge”. The author proposes, for the area of education, decolonization starting from a resignification of mechanical, instrumental and positivist-based Euro-centered knowledge. Rufino (2021) criticizes the method and formulas of the instrumentality and mechanical intellectual work of the traditional formats of science and suggests the decolonial option of investigative forms of action that are artisanal.

By unlearning the canon, ^{Rufino (2021}) indicates that rebelliousness and inconformity are practices in science that challenge the maintenance of a sole, colonizing and dominant knowledge. Countering, dislocating and deauthorizing become practices that aim at confronting the epistemicide and act towards dethroning Euro-centered forms of generating knowledge. He envisions, with the subjects of difference, “[...] the capacity to recover dreams with the broadening of subjectivities that form and are haunted by disenchantment” (^{Rufino, 2021}, p. 24).

[...] so that disenchantment is not seen as a cancellation of experience. It is paramount that we give credibility to what we learn in a processual way and not in as accumulative logic. This process, permeated with conflict, leads to criticism, the innovation of doubt, the availability to communicate and the acknowledgment of the inconclusive character of beings and the world (^{Rufino, 2021}, p. 14-15).

The author still adds a problematization concerning the reason for not adopting practices of a decolonial inclination as an educational act in basic education. However, we must focus on going beyond education and proposing these acts of rupture also for research practices in undergraduate and graduate schools. Decolonization is an option towards cure, according to ^{Rufino (2021}). It does not mean only disengaging from the geopolitics of knowledge that places practices of power and knowledge in Europe as the center of the world.

Hence, ^{Figueiredo (2017}, p. 102) explains that to implement this we must choose to decolonize our knowledge: “It is important to develop new epistemologies and new methodologies of knowledge [...] It is necessary to build new forms of relationship and relations within and without the academic forum”. To be insubmissive in the Portuguese language dictionary is to use “Rebellion; it is the absence of submission, the quality of that which does not submit. Disobedience; a behavior that denotes insubordination (^{Dicionário online de Língua Portuguesa, 2024}). And, finally, a radical is an [...] individual who adheres to radicalism, a political system according to which society should be the target of deep changes, going through a complete transformation of its social organization” (^{Dicionário online de Língua Portuguesa, 2024}).

By associating the words insubmission, disobedience and radicality, it is possible to notice what they have in common with each other. In general, what allows the association among them is the feeling of dissatisfaction with order, with what is seen as the rule, as universal. By using these practices in research, we feel a dissatisfaction with a scientific education that does not consider the locus of enunciation, the location of speech, the position of the subject who does research and uses their own experiences to become and grow as a scientist.

“Radical diversity is a critique of the roots that reveals not only coloniality but also the epistemic potential of non-European epistemes [...]”, as proposed by ^{Maldonado-Torres (2008}, p. 74). In this case, by radicalizing, disobeying and using insubmissive practices, the idea is to conceive of a science whose specific experience can be conjugated with the scientific field without having to interpret this as a loss of academic and scientific potential.

This leads us to question the possibility of blackening, ebonizing, faggotizing, tansvestizing, quilombizing research in education. Below are the contributions of bell hooks and Meg Rayara to help us understand this.

Disobedient, insubmissive and radical possibilities

bell hooks, stylized in lower case, is the pseudonym chosen by Gloria Jean Watkins. Born in the United States, hooks lived was born in 1952 and died in 2021. She was a writer, teacher and antiracist feminist activist. I met hooks during the pandemic through a number of web conferences. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom was the first book by hooks I read.

This book, which uses the perspective of Paulo Freire of education as freedom, was captivating to me. I thought over and over again how the book could be seen as a scientific text. I used it time and again in many classes I taught at college, along with Freire’s debate of education as a practice of freedom. I explored the meanings the author proposed about lived experience and engaged pedagogy.

There are two concepts, in my view, for anyone facing problems in occupying their space in a scientific text, that would seamlessly solve this colonial wound when reading the author. In her introduction, hooks begins exposing her experience when she sees herself as a teacher-writer-feminist critic, demonstrating her aspirations as an American black woman. She saw herself placed between being a teacher to survive and the dream and wish of being a writer: “Writing, I believed then, was all about private longing and personal glory, but teaching was about service, giving back to one’s community” (^{hooks, 2013}, p. 10).

By introducing her story in the text, ^{hooks (2013}) will allude to a number of family experiences intersected by events related to gender, race and sexuality. These events were at times seen as an isolated reading, at others, as critical and intersectional, by hooks. She questioned male power inside the home and in school institutions, education within the black community, becoming a teacher or taking on some other profession for the black women of her time, and contact with white schools.

From the experiences she lived with her family, in schools in the American black community and in white schools, hooks will create a transgressive proposal for education as a practice of freedom, with the goal of looking at conservative educational practices with a great deal of distrust through a radical, anti-colonialist, critical and feminist pedagogy based on the recognition of the existential experience of each student in the classroom.

[...] This complex and unique blending of multiple perspectives has been an engaging and powerful standpoint from which to work. Expanding beyond boundaries, it has made it possible for me to imagine and enact pedagogical practices that engage directly both the concern for interrogating in curricula that reinscribe systems of domination (such as racism and sexism) while simultaneously providing new ways to teach diverse groups of students (^{hooks, 2013}, p. 20).

The proposal of an engaged pedagogy, ^{hooks (2013}) explains, contrary to the critical proposal of feminist pedagogy, is focused on the well-being of the students and teachers, since both become active in the educational process. In this sense, the school model that functions within the engaged pedagogic perspective must attack the capitalist model of objectification of the body and mind, or of their separation.

As a teacher, ^{hooks (2013}, p. 35) reports that, when beginning to engage in the teaching field through lived experiences, this “[…] eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators”. hooks’ proposal of an engaged pedagogy leads to the acknowledgement that the teacher’s voice in the classroom is not the only narration that needs to be recognized as endowed with importance. The experiential narrative of the students must also converge with the pedagogical field to make sense.

From all that was read by ^{hooks (2013}), we propose to explore the idea of theorizing daily life as a way to be free of daily oppressions, or coming together on behalf of better forms of social protagonism. The refuge found by hooks (2013) in theorization was a way to cast herself fully alive onto the scientific field so that she could educate herself about oppressions related to gender, race and work, which the author experienced in her life. This was a research practice that could be seen as being self-ethnographic, participative or of memory, but that did not use these terms to be seen as scientific. The author says,

[...] I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently. This “lived” experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, became a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away. Fundamentally, I learned from this experience that theory could be a healing place (^{hooks, 2013}, p. 83-85, emphasis added by the author).

Many of us researchers deal with a field of research in education that does not value our existential experiences. An example of this is the acceptance of being present in academic writing from a locus of speech without this being seen as an opinion. This is a scientific practice of production of delegitimization, since in the place of opinion, no knowledge is created except for meaningless resonances. However, our lived experiences as a way to generate knowledge based on the use of an insubmissive, disobedient and radical methodology suggests we look at our experience with scientific texts to question why the scientific field has expelled us.

^{hooks (2013}) offers many methodological options to construct research methods. For the author, knowledge is a cure, self-recovery that aims to questions violations, oppressions, domination and dehumanization. For diversity groups, it offers strength to do research. Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira, in the same manner, aims to bring down the canon. A teacher at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), the title of her doctoral dissertation was O diabo em forma de gente: (r)existências de gays afeminados, viados e bichas pretas na educação [The devil itself: (r)existences of black effeminate gays, faggots and queens in education], with a prologue before the introduction of her study. In two parts of her prologue, she says “she is the devil” and the “demon’s little faggot”. To the moralistic and normative eyes of the traditional research field, this is an insult to the hegemonic forms of doing research.

In the first part of the prologue, Meg explores how the figure of the devil was represented at different historical moments to find the point in which this historical understanding met head on with a negative and racist representation of black people. White people being represented as something positive and black people as negative. The devil was the figure that could most incorporate this last idea: “[…] the devil was also associated to homosexuality, its agents being homosexuals, gays, effeminate, faggots and queens condemned to the fire of hell” (^{Oliveira, 2017}, p. 15).

By representing the figure of the devil at different moments of her childhood, Megg connects it to the vigilance it maintained while, at the same time, it made sure that transgressions would not occur. The devil was also a figure that implicitly received the responsibility from its stewards to curb/watch a series of behaviors that were seen as transgressive to the cistem: “It was like an ever-present nanny that my mother and other poor women in the neighborhood could contact to help raise a ‘bunch’ of children that were not always at arm’s reach” (^{Oliveira, 2017}, p. 16).

At a second moment, Megg mentions the primer Caminho suave [Gentle Path]. in her experience of learning to read. From the start, the author questions the subject the primer showed on its cover - a white boy and a blond girl: “This image reaffirmed models of whiteness and the cisgendered, heterosexual norm, informing me and other poor, black and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transvestite and transexual (LGBT) children that our path within the school would be far from gentle (^{Oliveira, 2017}, p. 17).

Evidently, as a child, the author recalls the impossibility of reading the didactic material critically, a primer that authorized the circulation of discourses that did not correspond to the social identity of the black children in the classroom. However, later on, her racial and critical reading led to an interpretation of the racist content found there and the search for existential models located outside whiteness. Thus, this school experience is explained as follows:

[...] Many of these images illustrated school books, others circulated in posters, magazines, newspapers and comedy shows. The most derogatory images of the black population and/or homosexuals were used by classmates to remind me that my color was synonymous with poverty, ugliness, crime and submission and my sexuality was a contagious disease, hence, I should be avoided. The expletives, harassment and insults because of my fairy-like gestuality and my blackness aimed at highlighting the characteristics that were considered defects in the eyes of the LGBT-phobic and racist society in which I lived. It did not take long for me to be informed of the close relationship between night, dark and black as synonyms of evil and the color of my black skin (^{Oliveira, 2017}, p. 21).

Megg is the proof that there is racism and LGTB-phobia in schools. What does her experience lead to? In this case, it can be to think of science as a space of social change and transformation by building educational policies that can reduce the hardship faced by the black and LGBTI+ population so they can complete their educational projects of human development in basic education.

However, even when seeing these experiences in schools, there are still many people (designated as cis-hetero-terrorists) who do not sanction the discourse and meaning seen in Megg’s experience. Among the many events that schools pedagogically and institutionally use to silencing Megg’s black experience, invisibility was one strategy that undermined the pride in feeling different from the processes that made positive social models out of heterosexist whiteness.

To understand oneself when facing racist and LGTB-phobic events is only made possible because of the knowledge mobilized in critically discerning this reality. The researchers of scientific texts that share experiences at the crossroads of social boundaries of race, gender, sexualities, territorialities and others do not aspire to be - as I have heard from some researchers - manipulative or self-promotional.

These texts contain their own scientificity when disclosed and interpreted at the theoretical plane of a series of epistemologies. To bedevil research in education is sometimes pertinent to be able to think of other possibilities within the educational milieu. Another possibility, for example, would be to attack conservative concepts of schooling that insist in forming a standard model of children and adolescents based on an ontological concept of superiority of race, gender and sexuality - cis-hetero-white-centric - which leads others to not be (^{Fanon, 2008}).

By using terms such as bedevil and whoring, I was able to present some reflective points for a disobedient posture towards the canonic models of research in the area of education, as a way, by doing research with people and our own experiences, our existence would not need to be erased or impartialized to be seen as a scientific text. To bedevil

[...] because I have “blood in my eyes” to change the way some groups are the protagonists of research and, in many cases, are used as mere “research objects”, are indeed the trampoline for the career of the researcher, and later are left aside as if, as researchers, we did not have the obligation and social commitment to give something back to them (^{Silva, 2021}, p. 276, author’s quotation marks).

It is not possible to go on following the demands of scientific impartiality. To challenge this kind of thinking, we must adopt a scientific behavior that opposes canonic structures like Megg did in her doctoral dissertation, when she mobilized her racial and LGBT experiences during childhood and basic education to communicate with the epistemologies chosen in her scientific study.

Final considerations

Throughout my entire trajectory as a researcher, I have often been the advisor, I have been on panels, or in the company of colleagues, at teacher and pedagogic meetings on practices that are considered anti-scientific. Among these, I would first like to highlight the normative guidelines about writing a text. These include writing impartially, not using the first name of the text’s author, not including more than two citations per page, and so on.

And - when speaking of my own conduct - saying that research that objectifies people should not be seen as research in the area of the humanities. Right after starting to work at the public university, I tried to make myself give in to the canonic wishes of those, who with insidious orientations, tried, as friends, to inform me that I would not be able to occupy a scientific place and have a renowned career.

I believe that many of these events were crucial for my formative project as a teacher and researcher. However, they implicitly encompass a canonical movement of rigidity in the area of research in the humanities and education. They imply that the traditional model of doing research does not admit insubmissive, disobedient and radical practices as a reflex of thoughts, feelings, sensations, being pissed-off, the brutalization experienced by black, LGBT+ people, and other diversities and differences. It means saying that the scientific field will not accept becoming black, transvestite, gay, dyke… in sum, it is not the place for people whose scientific mediations cause trouble, vulgarity and adopt practices that are not in line with the courtesy authorized by morality.

Research in education in a democratic context such as we have in Brazil can take place within perspectives of this geopolitical localization. We have the vestiges of a past which socially excluded certain groups that need to receive historical and cultural reparation. It is not easy for black, indigenous, LGBTI+ people, nor for women and others, to remain strong in contexts where practices aim to eliminate their presence. Research in education is a powerful space where these bodies can find equity just the way they are.

It is noticeable that research in education and in the humanities has been under attack daily. Partially, this happens because, recently, we have witnessed a larger number of authorships in research in undergraduate, graduate and other projects. These researchers are no longer afraid to demonstrate that there is no dichotomy between the researcher-teacher, researcher-professional and researcher-person. It frankly reveals that the basic education teacher or the transvestite sex worker also think from the localization of their bodies within a social reality, whatever it may be. These subjects present the starting point of science as the incorporation of their lived experiences (whether good or bad) in scientific practice, legitimizing themselves as scientists from the critical reflection of their experiences. Hence, most of these subject-researchers do not see the unhealthy need to, in many cases, ask for the blessing of those considered a reference in their study area, or even suffer their harassment, to feel they are the creators of knowledge.

The traditional way of doing research and presenting the identity of the subject-researcher still dominates: experiments in labs, impartiality, excess idealisms, eloquent distancing and disconnections with what is real. Because it is mandatory to separate emotion and reason in scientific practices, many undergraduate and graduate students learn they are not thinking subjects, or that their experiences do not make sense and cannot be incorporated into scientific and academic texts. This can increase the distance between people and science, propagating objectification both of the researcher and the researched, and broaden the distance between university and the institutions that render services (schools, social assistance centers, educational professionals and others).

It is a constructive endeavor to propose dislocations of traditional models of scientific practices that insist on continuing in the education of future researchers in the area of education and the humanities, to offer the unlearning of practices that delegitimize the success of their experiences as a form of communication that can enrich the scientific field. Science is also made with positioning, affects and emotions without discrediting its strict application. We have seen this with the disobedient, insubmissive and radical experiences of FalsBorda and Freire, presented by ^{Streck and Adams (2012}); with ^{hooks (2013}); Megg (^{Oliveira, 2017}); ^{Anzaldúa (2021}); and we hope with so many others who are still to come.