Identificações do feminino em materiais didáticos contemporâneos

Abstract

Given the persistent restriction of female presence in different space-times of contemporary societies, we developed this research with the aim of discussing the meanings attributed to the female in textbooks today. Assuming the hypothesis that school education, though not determine, takes part in the social process that result in the subordination of women, we focused in the handouts used by the final years of primary education in public schools of the City Department of Education of the city of Rio de Janeiro network, during the year of 2013. The handouts of Science, History and Mathematics were selected. We also developed study on the appropriation of the concept of gender in recent academic literature in Educational research, in order to map and discuss this another important instance of assigning meaning to a woman. In dialogue with philosopher Jacques Derrida and his theorizing about the social processes of meaning construction, our analysis were based on the understanding that words have unstable, provisional and precarious meanings, established in a relational and differential mode. With the theories of Joan Scott and Judith Butler, we bring Derrida s propositions to think about the mechanisms of female production in the social, through the concept of gender and the notion of performative identity. Among the results produced is the invisibility that women s history presents in the History material, the naturalization of functions presented as female in Science handouts and the reproduction of traditional conceptions about the place of boys and girls in the corpus of Mathematics. But we also found that the textbooks surveyed already have less sexist conceptions in the way to mean feminine, observing shifts that suggest some hybridization. However, these shifts are inserted into the textbooks timidly, causing the postulates with greater iteration power to be those who still reproduce old ways of being woman and man, which may reinforce gender stereotypes, if there is no access to information that counter those found.