This feminist poststructuralist study explores discourses of gendered and sexualized subjectivity of South African women who self‐identify as bisexual. The discipline of psychology has typically upheld a monosexual binary, where heterosexuality and homosexuality are positioned as the only legitimate categories of sexual identification. Within such a structure bisexuality is not considered a viable sexual identity. In broader public discourses female bisexuality is generally constructed in delegitimising ways, such as through constructions that necessarily equate bisexuality with promiscuity or describe it as an eroticized male fantasy, as a threat to lesbian politics, or as a strategy to retain heterosexual privilege. Data collection entailed conducting individual interviews with thirteen bisexual women and the transcribed texts were analysed using discourse analysis. The analysis focused on how bisexuality is Constructed in the interview texts, how the various constructions of bisexuality function and how Gendered subjectivity intersects with participants’ identity as bisexual. The analysis identifies a number of discourses that impact on, in varied and contradictory ways, participants’ positioning as bisexual. In a post‐apartheid context, participants regard fixing their Identity along strictly defined lines of difference as oppressive and resist bisexuality as being primary To their identity. Participants challenge the traditional gender binary through unsettling the automatic Linking of sex, gender and sexuality in discourses of sexual desire. However, participants also demonstrate the coercive effects of dominant discourse in the gendered positioning of subjects, with Heterosexuality in particular functioning as a normative sexual category with implications for participants’ gendered subjectivity. It then appears that parallel to its ability to disrupt the gender binary, bisexual discourse also acts in ways to support it. The analysis further indicates that in claiming a bisexual identity, participants risk marginalization in The face of delegitimising discourses that construct them in negative terms of promiscuity, hypersexuality and decadence. Powerful silencing discourses further construct same‐sex attraction As un-African and as sinful. The analysis concludes with a discussion of participants’ strategies to Normalize bisexuality. This study contributes to research accounts that explore diversity in sexual identification and creates Greater visibility of bisexual women in South African discourses of sexuality. It also contributes to theories of female sexual identities and adds to theoretical debates around the challenge to dominant gender and sexuality binaries posed by bisexuality. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Psychology / unrestricted

Human sexuality has been overrun with narratives that limit the possibilities of pleasure. Sex-positive workers have the potential to challenge the ways in which these limitations become embodied. In this research I explore narratives of sex education and youth, pleasure as prevention, and the medicalization of sexuality. I engage in collective biography as a way to identify how these narratives shape the way bodies and pleasure get taken up in specific places. Drawing from poststructural feminist theory I propose three ways of reconceptualizing bodies and pleasure as emergent sites of change and potential. Through an analysis of the experiences of sex-positive service workers in Canada, I consider what else, and for whom, bodies, pleasure, and sex education might look like. / Graduate / 0680 0733 0573 / yorkchender@gmail.com

This thesis analyses discourses about the roles and barriers to access for women to decision-making positions in Israeli sport organisations. In particular it focuses on the exploration of discourses of masculinity and femininity that underpin the relatively recent construction of Israel society and the institutions of sport within it. It is observed that for the most part, Israeli sport organisations are governed by men and have served the interests of forms of hegemonic masculinity. In order to understand and explore the social construction of these gendered discourses in Israeli sport, two innovative and significant policy initiatives toward gender equity in sport were explored through the perceptions and discourses of key actors. These include the establishment of a Volleyball Academy for Young Talented Girls (VAYTG) and the creation of the National Project for Women and Sport (NPWS). The theoretical framework for this thesis is informed by poststructuralist feminism, which provided an alternative way to understand and analyse voices of the (predominantly female) 'other' and thus to explore the historical contextual construction of current discourses of masculinity within Israeli sport organisations and society as a whole. The process of narrative revisions and production of gendered knowledge revealed how discourses produce and reinforce gender inequities in Israeli society, such as the discourse of militarisation or the unique political affiliation system in the sporting arena which continue to implicitly exclude women (and some men) from gaining access to leadership positions in sport organisations. Within this theoretical frame, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed as a methodological approach to analyse how female and male interviewees, all considered to be 'insiders' within their organisations, explained the process of the construction of gendered roles and barriers. Included in the interview data was also the auto-ethnographical accounts of the author, who was a primary actor in the process of developing policy in the two case study initiatives addressed. Dominant discourses of femininity (such as the discourse of sisterhood and of the processes of mentoring), and of masculinity (and how these promote uniformity) were identified as mechanisms for reproducing the gendered reality of sport leadership in Israel. The implication of a critical theoretical approach is that it should be emancipatory in its ambitions and impact, and the study is intended to contribute to enhancing the understanding of how discourse not only reflects but also creates barriers and opportunities so that the construction of such barriers can be challenged in progressive policy discourses.

This dissertation is an analysis of observations among, and interviews with, Romanian and Swedish employees at a Swedish development aid project in Romania. The aim has been to study the categories of ‘humanity’: how the notions of the ‘human(e)’ and the ‘inhuman(e)’ were created in the context of the project. Further, the aim of the thesis has been to connect the relations in everyday life as it develops in an aid project to the social and societal processes of change in today’s Europe. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the study. Chapter 2 analyses media representations of institutionalized children in Romania, and describes the development aid in Romania. Chapter 3 describes and analyses the practical work with the children in the everyday life of the project. Chapter 4 focuses on the locally employed project staff, and their adoption of a ‘more human(e)’ identity through working with the Swedish NGO. Chapter 5 analyses how the construction of difference took place in the everyday life of the development aid project. Chapter 6 analyses the development aid as exchange of gifts and applies models of analysis of social work with the so-called deserving and undeserving clients. Chapter 7 is a concluding chapter. The construction of the ‘human(e)’ and its opposite, the ‘inhuman(e)’, could be found on three levels. These categories were used in reference to: (1) the children, the sick elderly and the poor families that were the clients of the aid project and were expected to be ‘humanized’ in the course of project implementation; (2) the Romanians who were employed by the Swedish organization and who were to be humanized through their work and through learning Western views on what the human being is; and (3) by implication, the whole Romanian society and all the Romanians who were also to be ‘humanized’ through the intervention of the Western NGOs.

Os Projetos Especiais de Ação pertencem à história dos professores da rede municipal há quase vinte anos. Implantados, primeiramente, como uma ferramenta para as escolas gerenciarem melhorias em seus contextos, constituem, atualmente, o principal instrumento da formação docente em serviço. Tal formação objetiva provocar efeitos totalizantes, alcançando práticas institucionais e efeitos individualizantes, incitando cada professor a dar visibilidade às suas ações educativas a fim de recompô-las em modos particulares de pensar, fazer e dizer a profissão. Portanto, aliam-se, nos Projetos, uma tecnologia governamental, que busca conduzir e formatar ações escolares, e tecnologias do eu, que permitem, a cada indivíduo em formação, operar mudanças em si mesmo. Daqui, abrem-se e desenvolvem-se os capítulos iniciais do presente trabalho. Um capítulo dedicado a acompanhar disposições legais, publicações oficiais e acontecimentos que foram conformando os Projetos Especiais de Ação à formação docente no âmbito do trabalho; o outro, empenhado em delinear uma lógica de funcionamento desses instrumentos a partir de três eixos permanentes nas diversas configurações que tomaram ao longo das gestões municipais: a autonomia, a centralidade do aluno e a totalização das práticas em favor de alguma qualidade de ensino. Tais eixos acomodaram e levaram aos professores uma miríade de concepções de ensino e educação, mas também delimitaram as regras pelas quais as mudanças na escola e a própria formação poderiam ser pensadas. Contudo, este trabalho filia-se aos referenciais pós-estruturalistas e aos estudos de Michel Foucault, construindo a análise do ponto de vista das relações de poder e dos processos de subjetivação. Por isso, ao aproximar-se da vida que se vive nos tempos e espaços concretos de formação, depara-se com um campo aberto a múltiplas possibilidades de realização. Desse terreno, um horário coletivo de uma Escola Municipal de Educação Infantil, onde as professoras agem, pensam, falam, brincam, riem e produzem-se, destacaram-se os termos teoria e prática e o discurso da vitimização docente. Os primeiros elementos são utilizados intensamente para definir os posicionamentos profissionais e as relações estabelecidas com a formação em serviço; e o segundo fundamenta as maneiras de lidar com a profissão, normaliza o magistério e a infância e modula uma certa terapêutica do espaço formativo. Vidas ressentidas, doentes e frustradas por uma formação que não realiza a escola idealizada, regozijam-se nas satisfações e nos prazeres mais imediatos, mesmo que estes sejam fugazes. As professoras refutam colocar o presente em questão, entregando-se a posturas queixosas; dão as costas à política, restringindo-se a não aderir às propostas públicas de formação; e não assumem o risco de educar, apegando-se aos seus saberes, creditados como tipicamente docentes, e às formas habituais de pensarem a profissão. Não se pretende uma atitude ajuizadora dos modos de esses sujeitos constituírem suas existências profissionais, mas acredita-se que, para se imaginar novos desenhos para a formação em serviço ou para assumi-la como importante ou dispensável para a docência, é preciso perguntar sobre o que se tem feito, atualmente, nos tempos e espaços destinados aos professores pensarem sua profissão. / The Projetos Especiais de Ação (Special Project of Action) belong to the history of the municipal school teachers for almost twenty years. Deployed first as a tool for schools to manage improvements in their contexts, constitute today the main instrument of in-service teacher education. That education intents to cause totalizing effects, achieving the institutional practices and individualizing effects, inciting, each teacher, to show their educational actions to recomposition of them in particular ways of thinking, doing and saying the profession. Therefore, ally, on the Projects, a government technology, which seeks to conduct and format the school actions and technologies of the self which allow to every individual in education to operate changes in yourself. From this point, the initial sections of this research will be opened end developed. One section dedicated to follow the legal dispositions, the official publications and the happenings that had been conformed the Projetos Especiais de Ação (Special Project of Action) to in-service teacher education; the other one engaged to design a working logic of this instruments from the three permanent axles in different settings which took over the municipal administrations: the autonomy, the centrality of the student and the aggregation of efforts in favor of some quality of teaching. Those axels placed and conducted a plenty of educational conceptions to the teachers, but also delimited rules by which the school changes and the education could be thought. However, this research is affiliated to the poststructuralist references and to the Michel Foucaults studies, developing the analysis from the power relations and the subjectivity point of view. Therefore, when approaching the life that is lived in the factual time and place of education, it faced with a filed open to multiple possibilities of achievement. In this field, a collective time of a public school early childhood education, where the teachers act, think, speak, play, laugh and produce themselves, it was detached the terms theory and practice and the teaching victimization discourse. The first elements intensively used to define the professional positioning and the relations established with the in-service education. The second one based ways of dealing with the profession, normalizes the teaching and the childhood and modulates a certain therapeutic of the education. Resentful, sick and frustrated lives for an idealized school that cannot be implemented rejoice themselves with the more immediate satisfactions and pleasures, even if fleeting. The teachers refute to put the present into question, indulging in complainant postures; turning their backs on politics, restricted to ignore the proposed of public in-service education; and do not taking the risk of educating, clinging to their knowledge, credited as typically teaching, and to the habitual ways of thinking about the profession. Do not want an attitude of censorship of the ways the subjects constitute their professional existences, but it is believed to imagine new designs for the in-service education or to take it as important or dispensable for teaching, it is necessary to ask what has been done, nowadays, in times and places for teachers thinking their profession.

Participatory research methodologies and the use of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) such as email are increasingly seen by many researchers, including feminists, as offering ways to enhance women’s inclusion, participation and empowerment. However, from critical and poststructuralist perspectives, some researchers suggest the need for greater caution about claims that participatory methodologies and certain communication technologies automatically enhance inclusion and empowerment. These researchers argue that issues of power, agenda and voice in the research context require greater attention (LeCompte, 1995). The major argument made in this thesis is that feminist researchers need to adopt a more critical and rigorous yet pragmatic approach to evaluating women’s empowerment, inclusion and participation, and that this approach needs to include an analysis of diversity and difference, macro and micro contexts, power-knowledge relations, and the contradictory effects of participation. The outcomes of this study suggest that this approach can create new knowledge and understanding that will enable the development of more effective strategies for women’s empowerment and inclusion. To explore and support this argument, findings are presented from a detailed evaluation and critique of a major feminist action research project that involved women in rural, regional and remote Queensland, Australia and elsewhere, a university research team and several government and industry partners. The project made extensive use of ICTs, including email and the Internet, and aimed to be empowering and inclusive. Given the many contradictory discourses of empowerment that currently circulate, empowerment is seen as a problematic concept. The multiple meanings and discourses of empowerment are therefore identified and considered in the analysis. With the increasing importance of communication technologies in rural community development, this study also evaluates the effectiveness of ICTs as a medium for empowering rural women. The ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that underpins attempts to include a diversity of rural women in feminist research projects presents many challenges to feminist praxis. Chapters 1 and 2 propose that, in evaluating such projects, researchers need to take diversity and difference into account to avoid reproducing stereotyped images of rural women, and to identify those who are included and excluded. This is because of the complex nature of the identity ‘rural woman’, the multiple barriers to women’s participation, and the diverse needs, agendas and ideologies of participants and stakeholders. The concept of seriality (Young, 1994) is used in this study to avoid reproducing ‘rural women’ and feminist researchers as women with a singular identity. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that a comprehensive and critical analysis of these complex issues requires an eclectic, transdisciplinary approach, and that this can be fruitfully achieved by using a combination of two feminist frameworks of theory and epistemology: praxis feminism and feminist poststructuralism. While there are commonalities between these frameworks, the feminist poststructuralist framework takes a much more cautious and critical approach to claims for empowerment than praxis feminism. The praxis feminist framework draws on feminist theories that view power as social, cooperative and enabling. Women’s diverse needs, values, issues and experiences are taken into account, and the analysis aims to gives voice to women. The purpose of this is to better understand the processes that meet women’s diverse needs and could be empowering and inclusive for women (or otherwise). In contrast, the feminist poststructuralist framework uses Foucault’s (1980) analytic of power as positive and strategic, exercised in all our interactions, and intimately connected to knowledge. The power-knowledge relations, and the multiple and shifting discourses and subject positions that were taken up in various research contexts are identified and analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the contradictions and dangers inherent in feminist practices of empowerment that often go unnoticed. To achieve its practical and critical aims, this study uses two different, but complementary, research methodologies: participatory feminist evaluation and feminist deconstructive ethnography, and multiple research methods, which are outlined in Chapter 3. This eclectic approach is argued to provide maximum flexibility and creativity in the research process, and to enable the complexity and richness of the data to be represented and understood from a diversity of perspectives. Triangulation of the multiple methods and sources of data is employed to increase the validity and rigour of the analysis. Assessing how well feminist projects that use ICTs have met the aim of including a diversity of women requires an analysis of a wide range of complex social, economic, cultural, technological, contextual and methodological issues related to women’s participation. Analysing these issues also requires giving voice to a diversity of participants’ and stakeholders’ assessments and meanings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. The results of this analysis, set out in Chapter 4, suggest that differences in perceptions of diversity and inclusion are strongly related to participants’ and stakeholders’ political and ideological beliefs and values, and their degree of commitment to social justice issues. The evaluation found that a limited diversity of women participated in the project, and identified many barriers to their participation. Feminists argue that women-only activities are often more empowering than mixed gender activities. The evaluation findings detailed in Chapter 5 suggest that the project’s women-centred activities, particularly the workshops and online groups, were very successful in meeting the multiple needs of most participants. However, contradictory or undesirable effects of the project’s activities were also identified. This analysis demonstrates the need to consider the various groups of participants and their diverse needs in assessing how well feminist methods and activities have met women’s needs or are empowering. Chapter 6 identifies various forms and features of empowerment and disempowerment and categorises them as social, technological, political and psychological. A model is developed that illustrates the interrelationships between these four forms of empowerment. Technological empowerment is identified as a new under-theorised form of empowerment that is seen as increasingly important as ICTs become more central to women’s networking and participation. However, the findings suggest that the extent to which participants want to be empowered needs to be respected. While many participants were found to have experienced the four forms of empowerment, their participation was also shown to have had various disempowering effects. The project’s online group welink (women’s electronic link), which linked rural and urban women, including government policy-makers, was assessed as the most empowering project activity. The discourse analysis and deconstructions, undertaken in Chapter 6, identify competing and contradictory discourses of new communication technologies and feminist participatory action research. The various discourses taken up by the researchers and participants were shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects. The analysis demonstrates the intersection between empowerment and disempowerment and the shifting subject positions that were taken up, depending on the research context. It was argued that the discourses of feminist action research operated as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) that regulated and constrained the discourses and practices of this form of research. An analysis of a highly contentious welink discussion challenges feminist assumptions that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, be empowering. This analysis highlights the intersection of voice and silence, the limitations of the gendered discourse of care and connection, and how this discourse, and other factors, regulated the use of more critical discourses. Critical reflections on the study are made in Chapter 7. They include the suggestion that an ‘impossible burden’ was placed on the project’s feminist researchers who used an egalitarian feminist discourse that produced expectations of ‘equal relations’ between participants and researchers. However, these relations had to be established in the context of a university-based project that involved senior academic, government and industry staff. Drawing on the new knowledge and understandings developed, this study proposes several principles and strategies for feminist participatory action research projects that seek the inclusion and empowerment of rural women and use ICTs. They include the suggestion that feminists need an awareness of the limits to the politics of difference discourse when power-knowledge relations are ignored. A further principle is that there is value in adopting a Foucauldian analytic of power, since this enables a better understanding of the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of power-knowledge relations in the research context. This approach also provides an awareness of how processes that attempt to empower will inevitably produce disempowerment at certain moments. Principles and strategies for undertaking participatory feminist evaluations are also suggested.

Adults working as teachers and doctors can find it difficult to communicate well with young people about the issues that affect their wellbeing and learning and thus miss opportunities to contribute when their clients experience adversity. Drama is often used as a pedagogical tool to assist people to develop their communication skills. Dramatic portrayals however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for learning through drama to contribute to a patronising world-view and lead to the assumption that a set of formulaic approaches can bridge the communication divide. There is thus a need for research that engages both theoretically and technically with the use of drama as a tool for applied learning. In this thesis, a reflective practitioner methodology is used to explore the use of drama as a method in participatory enquiry and as a tool in the professional education of teachers and doctors. Use of the practitioner perspective permits analysis of the alignment between theory and practice. The Learning Partnerships project provides the context within which to conduct this enquiry. In this project the researcher leads drama workshops that bring together classes of school students and tertiary students completing their studies in medicine or education. The adolescents work as co-investigators with the teachers and doctors, exploring how to communicate effectively in the institutional contexts of schools and clinics.

Magister Artium - MA / Through a literary analysis of two contemporary novels, J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), in which a common concern seems to be an exploration of what it means to be human, the thesis seeks to explore the relationship between human consciousness and language. This dissertation considers the development of a conception of the human based on rationality, and which begins in the Italian Renaissance and gains momentum in the Enlightenment. This conception models the human as a stable knowable self. This is drawn in contrast to the novels, which figure the absence of a stable knowable self in the representation of their protagonists. The thesis thus interrogates language's capacity to provide definitional meanings of the ''human.'' On the other hand, although language's capacity to provide essential meanings is questioned, its abundant expressive forms give voice to the experience of human being. Drawing on a range of fields of enquiry, both philosophical, linguistic, and bio-ethical, this thesis seeks to explore the connection between human consciousness and the medium of language. It considers how the two novels in question play with the concept of language to produce or imagine other ways of thinking about human existence, and other ways of creating meaning to human existence through the representation of their novels.

[pt] Nesta dissertação, são analisadas práticas discursivas de atores estatais que constroem, de diversas formas, a Política de Pacificação e, mais especificamente, o Programa de Polícia Pacificadora no Rio de Janeiro, desde seu surgimento em 2008. Em uma análise de discurso pós-estruturalista, são identificadas duas articulações discursivas principais: por um lado, o Programa é construído como um conjunto de práticas voltadas para a retomada de territórios que representam uma fonte de risco para a população como um todo, o que torna possível o emprego de práticas violentas e militarizadas; por outro lado, o Programa é construído como um conjunto de práticas voltadas para a gestão da vida e fomento do desenvolvimento socioeconômico das comunidades em processo de pacificação. A partir da análise das práticas discursivas associadas às duas articulações, argumento que a disputa pela estabilização dos significados associados à pacificação no Rio de Janeiro reflete uma ambiguidade mais ampla associada ao emprego de práticas biopolíticas pelo Estado: ao mesmo tempo em que se defende que toda a população deve ter seus direitos assegurados e seu desenvolvimento fomentado, o Estado mantém para si a prerrogativa de delimitar, de forma soberana, certos espaços e sujeitos como fontes de risco para a população, submetendo-os a formas distintas e iliberais de governo. No caso da pacificação, argumenta-se que tal ambiguidade gera impactos que incluem a persistência de práticas policiais violentas lado a lado a esforços de policiamento de proximidade – o que, no limite, pode impactar a sustentabilidade do Programa e seus resultados. / [en] This dissertation offers an analysis of state actors discursive practices which construct, in various ways, the Pacification Policy and, more specifically, the Pacifying Police Program in Rio de Janeiro, created in 2008. In a post-structural discourse analysis, two main discursive articulations are identified: on one hand, the Program is constructed as a set of practices aimed at the recovery of those territories which pose a risk to the whole population, which enables the deployment of violent and militarized practices; on the other hand, the Program is constructed as a set of practices aimed at the management of life and the promotion of socioeconomic development in the communities undergoing a pacification process. By analyzing the discursive practices associated with both articulations, I argue that the dispute over the stabilization of meanings associated with pacification in Rio de Janeiro reflects a broader ambiguity, which is associated to the deployment of biopolitical practices by the state: while it is defended that the entire population must have their rights assured and they development promoted, the state maintains the prerogative to delimitate, in a sovereign manner, certain spaces and subjects as sources of risk to the population, submitting them to distinct and illiberal forms of government. In the case of pacification, it is argued that such ambiguity leads to impacts such as the coexistence between a persistence of violent police practices and efforts of proximity policing – which may arguably impact the sustainability of the Program and its results.

Os Projetos Especiais de Ação pertencem à história dos professores da rede municipal há quase vinte anos. Implantados, primeiramente, como uma ferramenta para as escolas gerenciarem melhorias em seus contextos, constituem, atualmente, o principal instrumento da formação docente em serviço. Tal formação objetiva provocar efeitos totalizantes, alcançando práticas institucionais e efeitos individualizantes, incitando cada professor a dar visibilidade às suas ações educativas a fim de recompô-las em modos particulares de pensar, fazer e dizer a profissão. Portanto, aliam-se, nos Projetos, uma tecnologia governamental, que busca conduzir e formatar ações escolares, e tecnologias do eu, que permitem, a cada indivíduo em formação, operar mudanças em si mesmo. Daqui, abrem-se e desenvolvem-se os capítulos iniciais do presente trabalho. Um capítulo dedicado a acompanhar disposições legais, publicações oficiais e acontecimentos que foram conformando os Projetos Especiais de Ação à formação docente no âmbito do trabalho; o outro, empenhado em delinear uma lógica de funcionamento desses instrumentos a partir de três eixos permanentes nas diversas configurações que tomaram ao longo das gestões municipais: a autonomia, a centralidade do aluno e a totalização das práticas em favor de alguma qualidade de ensino. Tais eixos acomodaram e levaram aos professores uma miríade de concepções de ensino e educação, mas também delimitaram as regras pelas quais as mudanças na escola e a própria formação poderiam ser pensadas. Contudo, este trabalho filia-se aos referenciais pós-estruturalistas e aos estudos de Michel Foucault, construindo a análise do ponto de vista das relações de poder e dos processos de subjetivação. Por isso, ao aproximar-se da vida que se vive nos tempos e espaços concretos de formação, depara-se com um campo aberto a múltiplas possibilidades de realização. Desse terreno, um horário coletivo de uma Escola Municipal de Educação Infantil, onde as professoras agem, pensam, falam, brincam, riem e produzem-se, destacaram-se os termos teoria e prática e o discurso da vitimização docente. Os primeiros elementos são utilizados intensamente para definir os posicionamentos profissionais e as relações estabelecidas com a formação em serviço; e o segundo fundamenta as maneiras de lidar com a profissão, normaliza o magistério e a infância e modula uma certa terapêutica do espaço formativo. Vidas ressentidas, doentes e frustradas por uma formação que não realiza a escola idealizada, regozijam-se nas satisfações e nos prazeres mais imediatos, mesmo que estes sejam fugazes. As professoras refutam colocar o presente em questão, entregando-se a posturas queixosas; dão as costas à política, restringindo-se a não aderir às propostas públicas de formação; e não assumem o risco de educar, apegando-se aos seus saberes, creditados como tipicamente docentes, e às formas habituais de pensarem a profissão. Não se pretende uma atitude ajuizadora dos modos de esses sujeitos constituírem suas existências profissionais, mas acredita-se que, para se imaginar novos desenhos para a formação em serviço ou para assumi-la como importante ou dispensável para a docência, é preciso perguntar sobre o que se tem feito, atualmente, nos tempos e espaços destinados aos professores pensarem sua profissão. / The Projetos Especiais de Ação (Special Project of Action) belong to the history of the municipal school teachers for almost twenty years. Deployed first as a tool for schools to manage improvements in their contexts, constitute today the main instrument of in-service teacher education. That education intents to cause totalizing effects, achieving the institutional practices and individualizing effects, inciting, each teacher, to show their educational actions to recomposition of them in particular ways of thinking, doing and saying the profession. Therefore, ally, on the Projects, a government technology, which seeks to conduct and format the school actions and technologies of the self which allow to every individual in education to operate changes in yourself. From this point, the initial sections of this research will be opened end developed. One section dedicated to follow the legal dispositions, the official publications and the happenings that had been conformed the Projetos Especiais de Ação (Special Project of Action) to in-service teacher education; the other one engaged to design a working logic of this instruments from the three permanent axles in different settings which took over the municipal administrations: the autonomy, the centrality of the student and the aggregation of efforts in favor of some quality of teaching. Those axels placed and conducted a plenty of educational conceptions to the teachers, but also delimited rules by which the school changes and the education could be thought. However, this research is affiliated to the poststructuralist references and to the Michel Foucaults studies, developing the analysis from the power relations and the subjectivity point of view. Therefore, when approaching the life that is lived in the factual time and place of education, it faced with a filed open to multiple possibilities of achievement. In this field, a collective time of a public school early childhood education, where the teachers act, think, speak, play, laugh and produce themselves, it was detached the terms theory and practice and the teaching victimization discourse. The first elements intensively used to define the professional positioning and the relations established with the in-service education. The second one based ways of dealing with the profession, normalizes the teaching and the childhood and modulates a certain therapeutic of the education. Resentful, sick and frustrated lives for an idealized school that cannot be implemented rejoice themselves with the more immediate satisfactions and pleasures, even if fleeting. The teachers refute to put the present into question, indulging in complainant postures; turning their backs on politics, restricted to ignore the proposed of public in-service education; and do not taking the risk of educating, clinging to their knowledge, credited as typically teaching, and to the habitual ways of thinking about the profession. Do not want an attitude of censorship of the ways the subjects constitute their professional existences, but it is believed to imagine new designs for the in-service education or to take it as important or dispensable for teaching, it is necessary to ask what has been done, nowadays, in times and places for teachers thinking their profession.