Awkward typefaces. Cinema, diversity and visual literacy for teacher training

Abstract

The article’s aim argues for the need to incorporate, within initial teacher education, visual literacy tools capable of addressing LGBTIQ+ diversity without reducing it to an episodic curricular topic. Accordingly, the corpus is delimited around LGBTIQ+-themed film posters and, within that field, around typography as an interface that organises regimes of legibility, tone, and cultural authority. The method adopts a qualitative case-study design, based on a purposive selection of contemporary posters from international cinema and a genealogical contrast with key references from Spanish poster traditions, integrating a transdisciplinary reading that connects arts education with language and literary education, grounded in cultural studies. The results describe how typographic and compositional decisions modulate the visibility of dissidence, oscillating between closure, ambivalence, and irony, and how they provide analytic criteria transferable to university-based teacher training. The discussion links these graphic operations to forms of pedagogical mediation oriented towards human rights, and the conclusions propose a replicable line of understanding based on historical comparison, critical reading of paratexts, and interpretive design production, while identifying the corpus’s contextual heterogeneity as a limitation.