PRINCESAS, GUERREIRAS E REVOLUCIONÁRIAS: Repensando padrões de gênero e discutindo identidades por meio da literatura infantojuvenil

Abstract

Based on a critical reading of contemporary children's and youth literary works published in Brazil, this dissertation discusses the reproduction of gender patterns in childhood and its implications for the maintenance of oppressive structures that prescribe socially demarcated places for the feminine. For that, a genealogy of the emergence of the concept of childhood is used, which allows us to find out in what ways the social construction around an ideal femininity guided the foundation of children's literature as a didactic-moralizing tool. In these terms, it was also necessary to return to the history of women, in order to understand how the oppression of gender, race and class, historically imposed on them, directed them to the need to unite as a group and found an organized movement for the struggle for liberation. female, whose demands and questions guided the beginning of a process of reflection on the impacts of literary representations on the formation of generations of women who grew up reading these stories. Based on feminist theory, and considering gender as a theoretical tool for literary analysis, it was also sought to observe how contemporary Brazilian children's literature has proposed places of female protagonism that break with physical and behavioral stereotypes commonly conditioned to women. Six children's literary works by women, published in Brazil, were chosen to compose the corpus of this research, namely: A pior princesa do mundo (Anna Kemp, publisher Paz e Terra), Por que só as princesas se dão bem? (Thalita Rebouças, publisher Rocco), the two volumes of Histórias de ninar para garotas rebeldes (Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, Vergara & Ribas publishers), Meu crespo é de rainha (bell hooks, Boitatá publisher) and Rainhas (Ladjane Alves Souza, EDUFBA publisher). By analyzing them as representative of a contemporary literary and editorial segment, we sought to strengthen the debate about the importance of children's literature for the construction of the imaginary, and of a feminist and anti-racist education for the formation of a critical conscience since childhood.