Abstract

COUTO JUNIOR, Dilton Ribeiro  and  BRITO, Leandro Teofilo de. “Do you know any „flexible straight‟?”: Performative masculinities in debate. ETD [online]. 2018, vol.20, n.1, pp.81-97. ISSN 1676-2592.  https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v20i1.8647597.

The proposal of this text is to investigate how the constitution process of the masculinities as performative enunciations assists in formulating critiques to normative masculinity. In order to do this, we analyze two online conversations held on Facebook in 2015 with a group of young people who do not identify with heterosexuality and have been using the aforementioned digital network as a possibility to rethink bodies, genders and sexualities beyond binary normative models. The online research was developed through the principles of otherness and dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin, essential to recognize researcher and subjects as social actors who seek, collectively, new ways to produce knowledge. The theoretical framework adopted for the analysis of the conversations is supported mainly by the contributions of Judith Butler, who understands gender as performative utterances. Based on her studies, we recognize the infinity of possible meanings attributed to the masculine and the need to destabilize identity essentialisms. The empirical material produced with the subjects showed the denunciation of regulatory norms of gender that insist on privileging certain forms of existence. Added to this, the material brought us the opportunity to briefly reflect upon a subversive education in the light of queer theory. This implied the challenge of recognizing the need to expose, in schools’ quotidian, the limits and fragilities of a normative masculinity that prevents the human capacity to produce bodies, genders and sexualities beyond hetero norms.

Keywords : Sexuality; Gender; Performativity; Masculinity; Education.

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