gender, sexuality and childhood: children scenes against innocence

Abstract

The sacred and secular aura of innocence around childhood is still nowadays well preserved, having a strong impact on social discourses of protection; care and education. Conjugated to this aura is the child developmental discourse; very crucial to psychology and education; which strives to thoroughly describe and characterise childhood as a life stage; in order to claim truths about subjects who live it and how they must live it. In this way; our proposal with this work is to question the discursive production of innocent child; in psychology and education fields; through a feminist perspective and the childhood studies. Therefore; we assume as principal question figures gender and sexuality as possibilities to construct different views on childhood by looking over the experiences; the knowledge and senses that children are sharing in their playing cultures. The scenes we bring up as supports to our reflections come from researches with children in pre-school municipal public institutions; in Rondonopolis; Mato Grosso; Brazil; conducted in the scope of Childhood; Youth and Contemporary Culture Research Group (GEIJC). The main questions we raise with gender and sexuality as markers; when we take them to the scholar context; are: (1) the childrens place in their right of expressing their genders and sexualities in this context; (2) the possibility of these expressions to be recognized and have despatologised and viable existences in learning contexts; as well as their detachment from moral and excluding values; and (3) the possibility of recognition;by the school and cognitive politics produced in this context; of different trajectories of gender and sexual expressions in children. In summary; our inquiries are directed to question the developmental idea as a progress to a must be oriented by linearity and universality of gender and sexual expressions; which debouch intensely in pedagogical discourses in search of a phallocentric; masculinist; heteronormative; binary and bourgeois identity.