Strangeness as re-education

Queer Monstrosity in the Art Education Practice of the Transsexual Teacher T. Angel

Abstract

By demanding an epistemic reinvention of knowledge in the arts and education, the notion of monstrosity leads us to two questions: How does the knowledge produced by transsexual, travesti, and queer teachers contribute to estranging the assumptions underlying Art Education? What can schools learn from transsexuality? This article analyzes the artistic and educational practices developed by the transsexual teacher and master’s degree holder T. Angel, investigating how her experiences displace established conceptions of knowledge in the field of Art Education. To this end, we bring queer studies into friction with her pedagogical practices and examine the site-specific interventions carried out by students from Coletivo ERER+, in dialogue with the experiences of other LGBTQIAPN+ teachers whose practices are grounded in Ana Mae Barbosa’s Triangular Approach and Marina Marcondes Machado’s Spiral Approach. Thus, we analyze estrangement within Art Education with the aim of displacing the curriculum. To this end, we highlight the establishment of UNESP’s Office of the Pro-Rector for Affirmative Action, Diversity, and Equity, whose key figures include the transsexual professor and physicist Dr. Daniela Cardozo Mourão. To estrange in order to re-educate the school, the body, and knowledge. Estrangement as a mode of *operation*; a process of becoming. After all, wherever we go in the city of São Paulo, what we hear, through gestures, glances, and words, comes as a sentence: “You are strange…”.

Submission: Jul 21, 2026 ⊶ Accepted: Sep 29, 2026