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Reading is often regarded as a public good and an essential part of developing almost every aspect of human potential. In this article, we survey the "affective economies" (Ahmed, 2004) of literary reading through a textual and visual analysis of documents issued by Chile's Ministry of Education. Through a critical and diffractive reading of these documents with Ahmed's and Braidotti's (2018) conceptualizations of the affective, we claim that when reading is presented as beneficial, pleasurable, and promising, an assemblage of exclusion is set into motion. We describe how the affective repertoires in these documents reinforce oppressive and exclusionary neoliberal values under the guise of the promise of future happiness. The pleasure and happiness that can be achieved through literary reading, however, is only accessible to those who are willing to orientate themselves in the "right ways." In this orientation, the cognitive is privileged over the emotional, and readers are supposed to learn to postpone any current demands for the promise of future happiness.

This article inquires into what sort of socioemotional education and what understandings of empathy are formulated when pleasurable literary reading is encouraged and celebrated in neoliberal cultures. Through an analysis of four official educational documents nationally distributed in Chile, we explore the relations and intersections of discourses and affects about literary and socioemotional education. We posit that literary education and reading promotion are encouraged as means of socioemotional and citizen education and that this formation is characterized by a subordination of the affective and the emotional to the logics of the rational and disembodied. We read these documents alongside theoretical work on cultural politics of emotions and the uses of emotion in political cultures to highlight how reading promotion is presented as a tool to manage difference and foster peaceful resolution of conflicts. We relate these hopes sets on fiction reading to a celebratory cult of conviviality and happiness in neoliberal cultures and relate this to the recent -and ongoing-social uprising in Chile. In this article, we argue that when empathy is superficially addressed in relation to fiction reading, structural injustices are reproduced.

Problematizar la producción del género -y específicamente de lo femenino en el contexto escolar- es particularmente complejo. De un tiempo a esta parte, han sido las propias estudiantes quiénes han señalado la disconformidad con un sistema educativo que persiste en implementar acciones tanto institucionales como cotidianas que plasman y producen diferencias sexistas de forma significativa. La escuela se ha transformado así en un espacio de disputa y territorio en conflicto, donde conviven nuevas perspectivas de niñas y jóvenes en relación a las exigencias de derechos, de hacer escuchar su voz y manifestación pública de disconformidad, en el contexto actual de movilizaciones que cuestionan el neoliberalismo imperante. A partir del marco y contexto anterior, se analizarán las etnografías realizadas en dos establecimientos educativos, durante 2014-2018. En ellas es posible identificar dos ejes argumentativos relevantes que dan cuenta de la producción de mujeres como sujetos de segunda categoría, acentuando el análisis en el cruce entre las formas de economización de la vida en clave neoliberal, y las implicancias de esto desde una perspectiva de género.

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