Entre telas e sentidos: cine debate como ação educativa antissexista

Abstract

The objective of this research was to analyze the personal senses about gender produced by cinema within school education, grounded in Cultural-Historical Psychology and Marxist-oriented feminism as its theoretical-conceptual framework. Patriarchal gender norms, fixed in historically constituted social meanings, are appropriated by subjects and form personal senses in consciousness, later externalized as ways of being and existing in the world. Seven participants took part in the study, with an average age of 16 years, enrolled in the 1st and 2nd years of an Integrated High School program at a Federal Institute, mostly in technology-related courses. Data construction occurred through a film-debate activity based on the movie Tomboy, in dialogue with the chronicle “Who defends the queer child?”, developed during classes of the Polytechnic Curricular Unit entitled “Gender and Sexuality Diversity in Cinema.” The film-debate mediated the teaching of gender by articulating affectivity and cognition and was structured as a temporally sequenced activity (pre- film, film, and post-film), alternating collective actions (elaboration of personal senses, aesthetic experience, film discussion, and text reading) and individual actions (production of illustrations, reviews, and journals), mediated by instruments (meaning sheets, the film, discussion guides, and theoretical text) and signs (guiding questions and audiovisual, visual, oral, and written languages). The activity enabled participants to become conscious of their personal senses, mobilize affects, perceptions, and interpretations about the work, express contents of the aesthetic reaction, externalize, confront, and reorganize meanings attributed to the film, and promote their reflective re-elaboration through conceptual mediation. It also encouraged participants to think about themselves, others, and society, elaborating personal senses regarding the imposition of gender norms, masculine and feminine representations, social expectations, and nonconformity with these norms. During the activity, different psychological processes were mobilized, such as written expression of personal senses, reflection on aspects of life that had previously only been felt, catharsis of feelings and emotions, naming of traumatic and violent experiences, and appropriation of scientific concepts. The analysis revealed the appropriation of meanings containing ideological and sexist content related to family, childhood, and gender roles; the family as the main mediator between the child and patriarchal norms; the presence of a painful childhood past; and the child treated as a non-subject. Finally, the film-debate can be understood as an anti-sexist educational action, as it enabled the denaturalization of family and gender roles through conceptual mediation and the integration of affective and cognitive processes, in opposition to sexist education, which mystifies childhood, conceals the oppressive face of the family, and leads to a psychic development alienated from human possibilities, privileging affectivity in girls and cognition in boys.