Constituição de identidades da mulher em livros didáticos de português do ensino médio

Abstract

This research is based on the premise that school practice is historically constructed and that, in addition to producing and transmitting knowledge, it also (de)constructs and legitimizes identities in history, for example, in relation to the gender roles established for women and for men in society (BUTLER, 2003; LOURO, 2008; SCOOTT, 1995). Furthermore, it is considered that this construction implies certain power relations, inscribed in the most diverse practices and instruments used by the institution, as textbooks, for example (MARCUSHI E LEDO, 2015; MOITA LOPES, 2002). In this sense, the general objective of this work was to describe and analyze how gender identities are shown in Portuguese textbooks. The specific objectives were to verify regularities regarding the way textbooks operate in the representation of gender identities and examine which power relations are inscribed in these discursive school practices. The corpus of analysis consisted of textbooks adopted in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years of high school, belonging to different collections and with three copies for each of the three different series. The analyzed books belonged to the three most adopted collections in public schools in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, according to data from the State Department of Education. As a hypothesis, it was outlined that the Portuguese textbooks select gender patterns for the bodies, delimiting (im)possible identities for the subjects, from exercises, texts and authors. On the one hand, we raised the proposition that regularities and discursive dispersions can structure the discourses about/for bodies and that they are involved in networks of power that determine what they can and should do in their social practices. On the other hand, it was considered that the materiality of the manuals contains instances of resistance arising from the questioning, for example, about the behaviors attributed to women throughout history in Brazilian society. The data analysis was carried out from the theoretical-methodological framework of Discourse Analysis, more specifically from the postulates of Michel Foucault (1987; 1992), thus establishing an exercise of description and analysis of utterances selected based on the proposed objectives. The results showed a systematic movement between recognition and conservatism, both referring to women's social conditions. In the second chapter, the recognition feature can be seen in the presence of authors and texts that deal specifically with the aforementioned theme. The conservative aspect emerges from a significant discrepancy between the number of male and female authors in literary productions. In the third chapter, the recognition of these issues was observed in a set of linguistic-visual materialities in which resistance practices carried out by women are represented. Corroborating the aforementioned movement of meanings, these materialities show representations of women in socio-historically crystallized situations and places.