Abstract

MATTOS, Amana Rocha  and  CAVALHEIRO, Rafael. From protection to instruction: practical-discursive mobilizations around childhood in debates about gender and sexuality in education. child.philo [online]. 2020, vol.16, e48344.  Epub Aug 25, 2020. ISSN 1984-5987.  https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2020.48344.

This article discusses how assumptions about the nature of childhood have been triggered in the confrontations about the legitimacy of gender and sexuality themes in education in contemporary Brazil. We analyse two practical-discursive pitfalls that have been consolidated in these confrontations. The first, forged by anti-gender discussion and education activists, consists in the narrative construction of vulnerable childhood to be protected, and triggers moral panic at the prospect of discussions about gender and sexuality in schools. The second, more subtle trap, concerns the situation of passivity attributed to students in the school context, who are considered to be the subjects of instruction by teachers, including those moments when gender and sexuality issues are addressed in the classroom. The image of a child-prisoner, passive and in danger made-up by the “gender ideologues,” populates the narratives analysed in the first part of the paper. It allows us to discuss the political uses of the hyperinflation of this idea of child vulnerability. However, even in educational practices that invest in working gender and sexuality matters in school setting, we observe that children can be conceived as lacking agency, such as discussed in the paper’s second part. In order to challenge these logics, we highlight the ludic dimension and playing with conceptual and methodological tools that can contribute to a non-pedagogizing approach to gender and sexuality in education.

Keywords : education; childhood; gender; sexuality; heteronormativity..

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )