Public educational policies and sexualities in post-dictatorship Chile: opacities and hyper-visibilities of LGTBI subjects

ABSTRACT Once the civil-military dictatorship had come to its end in Chile, the following governments progressively began to pay attention to the need for an educational formation regarding sexuality. However, the predominant social approach to sexuality has been of a hetero-normative character, bound to the conservative spectrum and a biologic approach to interpersonal relations. Based on the discourse analysis of the set of laws and public guidelines on education in force between 1990 and 2017, it is possible to see how sexual diversity emerges as a social construct that comes into play based on the secrecy/visibility of its differences. Also, the inclusion of LGTBI rights can be traced back to four historic moments: an initial one, when there was a policy of institutional silence on the topic; a second one, when a general framework is established for educational programs with generalist references regarding sexual orientation and identity; a third one, when it is possible to discern a certain cultural dispute based on moralist and conservative perspectives; and a final one, where hyper-visibility of non-heterosexual sexualities takes force.