Fragmented identities: Mechanisms of power in managing bullying based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression

Abstract

The article analyzes bullying based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (SOIEG) as a governmental mechanism that articulates legal-institutional discourses, expert knowledge, and educational practices in Catalonia aimed at regulating behaviors, affections, and identities in the school environment. From a Foucauldian and Deleuzian perspective, with attention to lines of subjectivation, a thematic and discursive analysis is carried out of regulatory documents, parliamentary interventions, institutional protocols, and thirteen narrative productions with different agents from the educational community. The results show that the device reproduces identity categories and configures roles and intervention profiles through emotional management technologies and the normalization of diversity crystallized under the acronym LGBTI. They also show that prevention, detection, and intervention strategies tend to reproduce logics of individualization and accountability consistent with neoliberal rationalities, shifting attention away from the social structures that sustain discrimination and pointing to the transformative limits of these policies.