Um currículo de contos de fadas: a reiteração de normas prevalentes de gênero e a produção de resistências por meio de corpos de crianças-meninas

Abstract

The current Brazilian historical contingency has been setting, in many different ways, gender issues and children's bodies at the heart of sociocultural discussions. One of these proceedings is sharply reflected in the resorting of Fairy Tales literature elements to delimit reiterations and operate interdictions to gender relations. In this ultra-conservative political scenario, Brazilian people have been witnessing the implementation of a government in which the statement “girls can be called princesses and boys princes” proclaims and imposes to children’s bodies a regime of truth expressed in the prevailing norm of gender, the classic dichotomy between feminine and masculine. Considering this context, this dissertation takes as an object of study the articulation between Fairy Tales distributed by the Federal Government's program Conta pra Mim, and other contemporary Fairy Tales titles from a school library of the public municipal education network of Belo Horizonte. A set of 23 Fairy Tales books, added to a Family Literacy Guide – a central part of the Conta pra Mim program – became the corpus of analysis of this investigation, which I named a Fairy Tales curriculum, since I have considered it as a cultural artifact that enacts as a cultural curriculum for children and their families. The general objective of this research was to analyze the norms and resistances, related to gender, produced and disseminated by this Fairy Tales curriculum. The argument developed here was that, in this curriculum, there is a dispute between the gender precepts to be imprinted on children, which is constituted, on the one hand, by forces that reiterate the prevailing norm and, on the other hand, forces that resist to those statements. The reiterations seek to produce subjectivities conformed to the traditional social marks of femininity and masculinity. Resistance, on the other hand, incites subversions through child-girl bodies. This study is linked to a post-critical perspective of the curricular field, which is affiliated to Cultural Studies, in its post-structuralist aspect. This field is nourished by concepts of authors who discuss relations of power, gender, body, subjectivities, resistances, among other issues that affect the triad: curriculum, cultures and differences. In this sense, theories proposed by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler were crucial for the analyzes undertaken, especially the Foucauldian perspective, whose elements of discourse analysis resulted in the methodology adopted to investigate and problematize gender issues in this Fairy Tales curriculum.