Curriculum as a Performative Device: The Politics of Human and Nonhuman Categories in Chilean Classrooms

This article examines enacted curriculum as a performative device: a material-discursive arrangement through which classifications and subject positions become intelligible and acquire authority in classroom practice. Drawing on Judith Butler’s account of performativity in dialogue with Karen Barad’s posthumanist performativity, the study asks how curricular acts can render racialized, gendered, social, and ecological classifications self-evident truths closed to scrutiny, and what is at stake when they are taken as natural. We analyzed 97 ethnographic classroom records from Natural Sciences and History/Social Sciences in two socioeconomically contrasting Chilean schools, using the performative curricular act as the unit of analysis. The analysis focuses on three cross-disciplinary configurations: boundaries of belonging performed through native/foreign species and Chilean/immigrant distinctions; social and ecological relations presented through ordered representations; and racialized and gendered differences made available as evidence through bodies, images, seating, and access to materials. Student questions and teacher counterexamples sometimes exposed the instability of these norms, prompting qualifications or revised answers, although sustained transformation was not documented. Evidence is stronger for explicit racialized classifications than for classed subject formation or the effects of ecological representations. The article proposes curricular traceability—making a classification’s history, criteria, material effects, and conditions of revision available for scrutiny—as a way to open classificatory authority to contestation.