This paper reflects upon a didactic experience with students who took the Intermedia Dialogues, a class that I taught in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. Starting from the principle that words mean what they mean because they can decontextualize themselves (BAUMAN & BRIGGS, 1990) or move beyond their "original" contexts (DERRIDA, 1977) - i.e., they mean because they "travel," the discipline investigated how signs traveled within different theories: from fiction to clinic, from ethnography to fiction, from the favelas to the university. The main point here is that both teaching and learning that unfolded in that context, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, or the Carioca center (karai'oca means 'the house of the white' in Tupinamba language) was not properly an activity of human cognition, but of human condition - i.e., beyond mere cognitive issues in the language-teaching relation, this very relation rendered the emergence of particular human dispositions (RAJAGOPALAN, 2002). In following a perspective that takes language and society to be mutually constitutive, I scrutinize the identity claims that emerged in the ways students read and commented on texts that deconstruct dominant versions of gender, sexuality, race and subjectivity.
context; decontextualization; identity; teaching; reading