Representações de infância, escola e masculinidade em "O Menino Maluquinho", de Ziraldo (1980)

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the representations of childhood, school, and masculinity present in Ziraldo's work “O Menino Maluquinho”, published in 1980, considering them as symbolic constructions. The investigation is anchored in the conception of representation linked to History, understanding that literature not only reflects social realities but also participates in the production of meanings about subjects, experiences, and educational expectations. Within this framework, the study questions to what extent the work reaffirms traditional images of childhood, school, and masculinity, and to what extent it challenges, displaces, or resignifies such constructions. The analysis articulates children's literature and the History of Education, situating the work within the context of the final phase of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship and the country's redemocratization process. This is a period marked by debates about authority, discipline, freedom, and social transformation, in which childhood and school emerge as strategic fields of symbolic disputes. Considering this scenario, “O Menino Maluquinho” (The Crazy Little Boy) is examined as a cultural document that reveals sensibilities, values, and expectations socially shared by certain social groups, while simultaneously creating narrative possibilities for thinking about the child as a subject of historical action. The boy's protagonism, his relationship with school, family, and peers, as well as the construction of his masculinity, are understood as dimensions that articulate affections, norms, transgressions, learning, and experiences of socialization, highlighting tensions between control and freedom, between order and imagination. By mobilizing affectivity and fantasy, the work problematizes ways of being a child and ways of experiencing school, giving visibility to practices and values that help to understand the insertion of childhood in the social debate of the period. In this sense, Ziraldo's work contributes to illuminating how children's literature participates in the production of discourses about education, school, and the subjects who are formed within it.