Naturalização e/ou construção social: o vínculo entre magistério, cuidado e vocação no discurso de professoras e professores

Abstract

The sexual division of labor is fundamental to understanding the differentiated insertion of men and women in the domestic and mercantile sphere. While women historically carry out unpaid domestic work, which involves activities such as maintenance and care, whether with the home, with the children, or with close relatives, men dedicate themselves primarily to work in the commercial, paid sphere. This domestic work is exercised mainly by women, because, socially, an ideology of nature was built, which attracts, among other things, maternal instinct and patience to women, to justify that it would be inherent to them to care for the other. Since the sexual division of labor is a unique phenomenon, which refers to both the domestic and the mercantile spheres, when inserted in the labor market, women, in general, will develop activities that are related to what they already do in the domestic sphere. Therefore, women constitute the majority in areas related to care, such as education, where they are mainly concentrated in Early Childhood Education and Elementary School. In this sense, the present work aimed to understand how teachers, who work in these stages of education, conceive the socially established bond between teaching, care, and vocation. For this, the qualitative research included a theoretical analysis about the theme, which pervades concepts such as the ideology of nature, qualification, and feminization of occupations. In addition, the study included semi-structured interviews with teachers of Early Childhood Education and Elementary School. The results of the research were presented in five thematic axes and, in general, point to oscillations in the discourses referring to the ideology of nature, because now the reports naturalize the relations established in the profession, sometimes questioning them. Moreover, the discourses concerning the idea of vocation are also contradictory, in that there are attempts to re-signify the term.