Aprendendo a ser mulher no ensino médio: um estudo de caso sobre relações de gênero em uma escola do sul de Minas Gerais.

Abstract

This research concerns gender relationships in schools. It aims at analyzing how a school in a countryside of Minas Gerais state participates in the construction of gender social roles of students. Existing literature indicates that school, although full of diversity, defines how each individual should behave according to his or her gender, standardizing certain ways of acting and disapproving others. In this sense, the research is justified by a look at the daily life of a specific school through a case study. The study seeks to understand how is it to be a young adolescent at school, questioning relationships based on gender differences which are established among students and between students and other actors in the school environment. To handle the socializing function of the school, the theoretical approaches of Miriam Abramovay (2005), Juarez Dayrell and Juliana Reis (2007) were used. Michel Foucault (1997, 1999, 2009), Guacira Lopes Louro (1998, 1999, 2010) and Joan Scott (1995) have useful approaches to theoretically refer to questions related to gender, sexuality and power. The research had as methodological procedures participant observation, document analysis, interviews and focus group in a public high school of a small city in the South of Minas Gerais state, having as subjects 11 students of the 2nd and 3rd year of high school. Among the main results, the corroboration of trends already observed in other researches, in the researched case, about the role of the school as an institution that traditionally shapes gender social roles, while little problematizing gender relationships and sexism in its formal curriculum at the same time.