Pedagogies of aging: discursive emergence, governmentality, and disputes in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

In this article, we examine how aging becomes established as a discursive field in contemporary Brazil through practices and statements that determine ways of living, appearing, and being identified as old. Anchored in a post-critical perspective and combining Foucault’s discourse analytics with contributions from Silva and Bortolazzo on cultural pedagogies, we analyze the first National Teaching Exam (PND), the 2025 ENEM writing prompt, the public narrative of Alexandre Kalache, and the LGBTQIA+ Pride Parades in São Paulo and Florianópolis as cultural pedagogies that generate public sensibilities, guide conduct, and dispute meanings attributed to aging. We argue that these examinations activate repertoires aligned with the notion of “active aging” often moralizing behaviors and depoliticizing racial, class-based, sexual, and territorial inequalities. In contrast, we understand the dissident old-age performances present in the Parades as counter-conducts that create new temporalities and modes of existence, challenging and expanding the limits of what is considered legitimate aging. We sustain that Brazilian old ages are produced by regimes of truth and power relations rather than merely by demographic processes. Thus, we contend that their discursive emergence constitutes an urgent analytical field for Education.