Embodiment, gestures and female participation: between continuity and change in technical secondary schools

Abstract

In this visual essay, we invite readers and observers to take a journey through a collection of images with the aim of identifying physical, material and emotional traces of the recent and unstable nature of young women’s participation in an educational context historically characterised by its androcentric nature. These images were produced as part of an ethnographic study of an educational project involving female teachers and students who formed Argentina’s first all-female motor racing team in 2018. The images depict different types of hands handling tools and artefacts, getting dirty, exerting force, painting and drawing (evoking bodies, relationships, physical proximity, difficulties, skills and tensions). Furthermore, they allow us to recognise continuities and changes in the ways of inhabiting the workshop within a historical context of expanding rights and disputes over women’s right to appear in the public sphere on an equal footing with their male peers (Butler, 2019). This essay highlights the embodied, affective and socio-material process of constructing what, in technical schools, has come to be known as the ‘technical gesture’—in the case of young women who helped build an electric car that competed in a national motor racing competition for technical school students in 2024 and 2025.