Uma paisagem de ditos e escritos sobre gênero, mulheres e ciência na educação em ciências

Abstract

This thesis was developed within the scope of the Science and Mathematics Education line of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia. In this investigation, we inquired into the discourses and writings about gender, women, and science in theses that can be read as belonging to the field of Science Education. To this end, our general objective was to analyze the discourses and writings about gender, women, and science in theses within/of Biological Sciences produced in Brazilian postgraduate programs that occupy the territories of Science Education. Our specific objectives were to: i) map the production of theses on gender, women, and science in the country, and specifically within the territory of Science Education; ii) outline the panorama of the uses of the notions of gender and woman present in Biological Sciences theses that occupy the territories of Science Education; iii) highlight the contexts of production, authorship, recurrences, and dispersions of discourses and writings about gender, women, and science in these theses; iv) present the delineation of the type of subject put into operation by/in these theses. Methodologically, we aimed for an investigative gaze inspired by the idea of excavation, due to the support found in Foucaultian archaeology. The qualitative, [post]critical approach and perspectives serve as theoretical and methodological frameworks for the conducted research. For the composition of the research archive, theses were sought in online repositories – BDTD and the Capes Theses and Dissertations Catalog – using gender, woman and science as search terms. The archive was composed of 11 theses produced in Brazilian graduate programs in the area of Education and Teaching (Biological Sciences), forming the research corpus. The theses were read and analyzed in light of feminist and gender studies literature grounded in post-critical perspectives. They were dismantled, assembled, and reassembled in order to capture and produce layers, threads, and networks, enabling the composition of analytical lines. The discourses on gender, women, and science found in the theses denounce the absence of women in science and announce/enunciate the creation and implementation of strategies/actions/programs aimed at mitigating this absence. They enunciate new research objects; point out how science and its spaces remain masculine; how the trajectories of women in scientific spaces are marked by violence, discrimination, harassment, vertical power relations, resistance, conflicts between maintaining and remaining in professional life and personal life; and by conflicts between the desire to remain in academic life and the desire for motherhood. The category "woman" is the main key to interpreting the theses, which reveals what remains unsaid about other "woman" existences. This thesis argues that the discourses on gender, woman, and science produce or reproduce universal and/or universalized places, excluding or eliminating multiple and singular possibilities for both science and woman.