As queer scholars (non-binary trans and gay, respectively), in this paper we explore the potential of a history of education committed to recovering from Western colonial violence trans, gender nonconforming and queer experiences from early childhood to adulthood.

Starting from historical accounts (Actualidade 1879, O Comércio do Porto 1879, Lusitano & Froilaz 1879, O Tripeiro 1926) of the life and education of António Custodio das Neves (1858-1888), born in Portugal’s Douro region, assigned female at birth yet growing up male, and emerging from such accounts as the ‘Woman Man’/‘Man Woman’ [‘Mulher-Homem’ /‘Homem-Mulher’], we confront ‘colonialist practices of avoidance and erasure’ (Barad 2017, 76; 2023, 37) having invisibilised gender-nonconforming, nonheteronormative existences and experiences like his. We commit ourselves to a history ‘with and against the archives’ of a past ‘that has yet to be done’ (Martins forthcoming; Hartman 2008, 13) involving ‘times, places, beings [that] bleed through one another’ (Barad 2014, 179) into our present. Centring education from early childhood onwards as a trope with no less tangible effects, this history addresses ‘meaningful absence’, ‘void’, or ‘gaps’ as ‘excess’: a ‘lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming’ (Martins forthcoming; Barad 2015, 396; Hartman 2008, 5, 12). Trans/gender nonconforming and queer experiences thus did (not) yet exist (if) only (differently) ‘at their intersection with institutions of disciplinary power’ (Martins forthcoming; Heyam 2022, Mesch 2020) constraining the conditions of their non/existence (Barad 2017, Hartman 2008; Foucault 1972, 1980). Among such institutions were those policing conduct in civil society from a legal perspective, those studying, cataloguing and treating conditions based on then-prevalent views of medicine, psychiatry and psychology, but also educational institutions, from kindergarten onwards. Beyond Modern notions of linear temporality that stabilise boundaries between past, present and future (Thyssen 2024) governing dominant ‘fictions of history’, we endeavour to rescue ‘impossible stories’ (Hartman 2008, 10) ‘that are not the histories … archives wish to recount (Martins forthcoming, Steedman 2001) but may carry with them ('un/timely') 'difference that portends the future' (Grosz 2004, 11) present and yet to come. Any eventual such difference 'matters' as ‘substance and significance’ (Barad 2007, 3) for education, from kindergarten to school and beyond, in Portugal as elswhere in Europe. 

The case of António Custodio das Neves is intended as a preparatory excursion into a wider history of gender nonconformity and queerness in education from early childhood education and kindergarten upwards, particularly in Portugal and Norway (see e.g., Askland & Rossholt 2009).

Through what the literary scholar and historian of slavery Saidiya Hartman and the queer/feminist and quantum field theory scholar Karen Barad – both committed to troubling the machinations of colonialism – have figured methodologically as ‘critical fabulation’ (Hartman 2008) and ‘reconfiguration’ (‘material imagination’ as ‘embodied re-membering’/‘re-turning’)(Barad 2015, 2014), respectively, we set out to produce a reparative trans educational history of António Custodio das Neves’s experiences, venturing into what ‘could’, ‘might’ or ‘might yet have been’ (Hartman 2008, 5; Barad 2017, 56; 2015, 389). We thereby employ 'trans[/queer] as both 'identity and analytic’ undoing radical difference between male/female, Self/Other, here/there, and now/then coemerged with Modern Western colonialist ventures (Lehner 2019, 45) also for ‘visual technologies’ reifying a ‘gender binary system’ and (superficial) ‘aesthetic of sexual difference’ (Lehner 2019, Martins forthcoming). We flesh out trans experience anew from a situated mesh of time, place, age, gender, ethnicity, and class.

We intend to advance a ‘“recombinant narrative,” which “loops the strands” of incommensurate accounts and … weaves present, past, and future’ (Hartman 2008, 12), as ‘a work of mourning more accountable to… the victims of … colonialist … violence’ (Barad 2017, 56), yet resisting closure (Best & Hartman 2005) as well as foreclosure of ‘possibilities of justice-to-come’ (Barad 2017, 62). In doing so, we make a broader case for the urgent need for historiography of education to trouble colonialisms continuing to haunt it as it reproduces systems of power sustaining a ‘grammar' of 'violence’ (Martins forthcoming) and ‘cis colonial gender binaries’ (a matrix of cisgenderism reified in the West with the carrying out of colonialisation projects elsewhere, cf. Vaid-Menon 2020; Vaid-Menon in Lehner 2019, 61) and, along with it, ‘difference as apartheid’ (Barad 2014, 170; Trinh 1988, 2011; Anzaldúa 1987).

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