This paper addresses the ECER 2026 theme Knowing and Acting by examining how gender education operates as a form of biopolitical governance and how marginalized youth respond through embodied practices that challenge dominant educational rationalities. While gender education is internationally promoted as a progressive tool for social justice, equality, and inclusion, critical scholarship across Europe and beyond has shown that such initiatives may also reproduce normative expectations regarding subjectivity, communication, and citizenship. This study contributes to these debates by foregrounding the frictions that arise when institutionalized gender knowledge encounters culturally, classed, and historically situated forms of embodied experience.

The research is guided by three interrelated questions:

1. How does gender education function as biopolitical governance in everyday pedagogical practice?
   Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, this study asks how gender education governs not only through policies and curricula, but through subtle pedagogical norms—such as expectations of verbal articulation, reflexive self-disclosure, and rational consensus—that define what counts as legitimate gender knowledge.

2. What forms of epistemic and embodied friction emerge when such governance encounters Indigenous and working-class youth?
   In formal educational settings, marginalized students are often described as silent, disengaged, or resistant. Rather than interpreting these responses as deficits, this research investigates how silence, withdrawal, humor, and non-verbal action can be understood as embodied resistance to gender discourses shaped by middle-class and colonial assumptions. This question resonates with European discussions on educational inequality, migrant youth, and postcolonial critique, where misrecognition of embodied knowledge remains a persistent issue.

3. How can “acting” open alternative modes of knowing that reconfigure gender education toward healing rather than normalization?
   The study explores how alternative pedagogical arrangements—specifically board game workshops—enable forms of acting that suspend dominant regimes of knowing. It asks how such practices allow participants to negotiate gendered power, boundaries, and responsibility through action rather than moralized discourse, and what this implies for rethinking gender education as a site of relational repair.

The theoretical framework integrates four key strands. First, biopolitical governance provides an analytic lens for understanding gender education as a technology that produces governable subjects aligned with normative ideals of gender equality. Second, border thinking (Mignolo,2018) situates the research at the epistemic border where modern, universalized knowledge encounters local, subaltern, and historically marginalized ways of knowing. Third, the concept of intermediate objects (from Wangliang Asks Jing II: Intermediate Objects) foregrounds material and affective mediators—such as board games—that enable learning to occur in the grey zone between governance and resistance, identity and becoming. Finally, healing politics reframes healing not as individual therapy, but as a collective, relational, and political process that emerges when normative pressures are temporarily lifted.

By positioning Taiwan as a case that speaks to broader international concerns—such as the governance of diversity, the limits of rights-based education, and the decolonization of knowledge—this paper contributes to European and global debates on gender, education, and social justice. It argues that attending to friction and embodied action is crucial for reimagining how education can respond ethically and politically to contemporary poly-crisis.

Methodology: Board Game Workshops as Border Spaces of Gender Education This study employs a qualitative, practice-oriented research design combining Action Research and Interactive Ethnography to examine how gender education operates as biopolitical governance and how marginalized youth respond through embodied forms of resistance. The research was conducted in a rural secondary school in Hualien, Eastern Taiwan, a region shaped by Indigenous histories, labor migration, and educational inequality. Participants were Indigenous and working-class adolescents (approximately aged 13–16) who had prior exposure to state-mandated Gender Equity Education but were frequently described as disengaged or silent in classroom-based discussions. The core research activity consisted of a six-session board game workshop series, facilitated by the researcher within the school setting. These workshops were designed not as therapeutic interventions, but as alternative pedagogical spaces that temporarily suspended the normative expectations of gender education, such as verbal articulation, moral self-disclosure, and policy-aligned identity expression. Board games (including Dobble, Pig Pal, and Chandel) were used as border spaces and conceptualized as Intermediate Objects—material and affective mediators that disrupt teacher–student hierarchies and enable learning through action rather than abstract debate. Through gameplay mechanics such as territorial protection, resource negotiation, and scenario-based decision-making, participants enacted themes related to gendered power, consent, responsibility, and survival in embodied and relational ways. Data were generated through participant observation, fieldnotes, reflective journals, and analysis of verbal and non-verbal interactions during gameplay. The researcher occupied a dual role as facilitator and participant-observer, intentionally shifting from the position of a “gender expert” to that of a witness to local meaning-making practices. Rather than evaluating learning outcomes, the analysis focuses on moments of embodied resistance—including silence, humor, withdrawal, and improvisation—where dominant gender discourses were resisted, reworked, or rendered irrelevant. These moments are interpreted as expressions of healing politics, understood not as individual recovery but as a collective and relational response to the pressures of biopolitical gender governance.

Based on the analysis of interactional dynamics and participant feedback from the board game workshops, this study argues that gender education should not be understood solely as a process of cognitive learning or the internalization of rights-based knowledge. First, the findings suggest that Indigenous and working-class students—often described as silent, disengaged, or resistant in lecture-based gender education—demonstrated situated and embodied forms of agency within the board game setting. Through strategic decision-making, bodily action, and rule negotiation, participants actively shaped the learning space. Silence, therefore, is reinterpreted not as a lack of competence or motivation, but as an embodied form of resistance to dominant modes of biopolitical gender governance that privilege verbal articulation and middle-class communicative norms. Second, gender differences and conflicts were not primarily addressed through abstract discussion of laws or moral principles. Instead, they were negotiated in real-time through gameplay interactions, such as boundary-setting, relational coordination, and affective attunement to others’ reactions. These moments reveal gender learning as a relational and practice-based process, grounded in embodied experience rather than policy knowledge alone. Third, when the biopolitical expectation to perform as a “good gender-equity citizen” was temporarily suspended, participants displayed affective softening, mutual recognition, and cross-group collaboration. Healing, in this context, did not take the form of individual psychological recovery, but emerged as a collective and political process that reconfigured relationships and redistributed agency. This paper contributes to Network 33 by proposing “Healing in Acting” as a form of decolonial praxis in gender education. It suggests that for marginalized youth, gender education is most effective not when it imposes a universalized form of knowing, but when it creates a translation space in which embodied affects, local survival strategies, and non-verbal forms of meaning-making are recognized as legitimate knowledge practices.

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