Pedagogies of Cruelty at Home: symbolic violence and affective discipline towards dissident subjectivities in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

Abstract

This article analyzes how they manifest, normalize, and legitimize intra-familial violence against young men who build their sexualities from sexual and gender dissensions in Cartagena de Indias —a city crossed by structural inequalities, religious roots, and patriarchal family plots. Using a qualitative-phenomenological approach and a critical, intersectional, and situated perspective, 43 interviews and 10 discussion groups were conducted with young people from marginalized urban sectors, identifying five key categories: regulation, coercion, correction, moral defense, and defenselessness.

The findings show how the family environment, far from being a safe space, operates as a normalization device that, under speeches of affection or protection, imposes limits on desire and sanctions dissident identities, consolidating a regime of affective and symbolic discipline. In this context, the home becomes a setting for the pedagogy of cruelty, producing severe impacts on mental health, self-esteem, and the right to recognition. The study provides analytical tools to understand symbolic violence in the family sphere and proposes routes of psychosocial intervention and public action that recognize youth resistance and question the heteronormative hierarchies that sustain these forms of violence.