PEDAGOGY OF RESISTANCE – ANTIRACIST TEACHING AND LEARNING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF GLORIA ANZALDÚA’S “EMBODIED THEORY” AND PATRICIA HILL COLLINS’S “EPISTEMOLOGY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE”

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on antiracist teaching and learning as a practice of resistance and re-existence, articulating the foundations of Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Embodied Theory” and Patricia Hill Collins’s “Epistemology of Lived Experience.” In times of growing inequality and the rise of dehumanizing discourses, thinking about a pedagogy of resistance means recognizing the body, pain, and memory as spaces for the production of insurgent knowledge. Gloria Anzaldúa conceives the body as a liminal territory where cultural, spiritual, and political borders intersect, making embodied experience an act of epistemological creation. Patricia Hill Collins, in turn, asserts that the knowledge situated in the experiences of Black women constitutes a distinct epistemology, anchored in practices of care, dialogue, and solidarity. In this dialogue between body and experience, antiracist teaching and learning emerge as a political act of curriculum decolonization and the rehumanization of pedagogical relationships. The central objective of this article is to understand how the epistemologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and Patricia Hill Collins can ground a pedagogy of resistance aimed at constructing antiracist educational practices sensitive to corporeality, intersectionality, and the plurality of knowledge. The investigation is guided by the following question: how can “embodied theory” and the “epistemology of lived experience” transform teaching and learning into a critical, affective, and emancipatory process in the struggle against racism and intersectional oppressions? Theoretically, it draws mainly on the works of Collins (1999; 2004; 2009; 2012; 2019) and Anzaldúa (2002; 2009; 2015; 2022), dialoguing with hooks (2003; 2009; 2013; 2015; 2018), Freire (1992; 2014a; 2014b; 2014c), Berila (2016), Dei (2014), Kendi (2019), Ribeiro (2019), Gomes (2017; 2019; 2021), Santos et al. (2022), among others. The research is qualitative in nature (Minayo, 2007), descriptive and bibliographical (Gil, 2008), with a comprehensive analytical approach (Weber, 1949). The findings reveal that integrating Gloria Anzaldúa’s embodied theory with Patricia Hill Collins’s epistemology of lived experience allows for rethinking teaching and learning as practices of liberation and rehumanization. It was identified that the body and experience are legitimate sources of knowledge capable of breaking with the Eurocentric and technocratic logic of education. Affectivity, care, and dialogue emerge as political dimensions of the act of teaching, enabling the recognition of multiple silenced voices. Furthermore, methodologies centered on listening, narrative, and corporeality favor the construction of an antiracist and intersectional curriculum. Finally, it is understood that the pedagogy of resistance transforms the classroom into an ethical space of collective reconstruction of knowledge and hope.