Creativity, disability and gender: a view from Special Education

Abstract

This article invites us to think about creativity from a critical and decolonial perspective that favors possible transformations and allows us to question the impositions, oppressions and hierarchies imposed by a Eurocentric perspective. It presents a critical Latin American position on the definitions of creativity and it addresses creativity, gender and disability reflecting on the existing connection between these concepts, and exposing gender as an imposed social construction. This work resorts to different authors to analyze hegemonic and current conceptions of racism, sex-gender, and class, among others, and it highlights the concept of intersectionality to address the multiple discriminations that a person can experience due to their way of being in the world. Besides, it presents conceptual, ideological, and theoretical alternatives to the negative consequences of those studies whose perspectives of analysis lead to reductionist considerations. This work also values the process oriented towards the decoloniality of the concepts addressed in Latin America that enables the development of ideological and cultural perspectives matching local contexts.In this sense, creativity is framed from a Latin American stance due to the need of radical changes in the perspectives that centralize creative processes in isolated individuals without considering the surrounding context. Decoloniality, in turn, is based on the resistanceof racialized and oppressed groups against the dehumanization, exploitation and genocide that emerged from colonization. At the same time, the actions of the special educator are considered, exposing different forms of work and exemplifying some implications of creativity in a concrete way.