Princesas, guerreiras e revolucionárias: repensando padrões de gênero e discutindo identidades por meio da literatura infanto juvenil

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the reproduction of gender patterns in childhood and their implications for maintaining oppressive structures that prescribe demarcated places for the socially feminine. To this end, I resort to a genealogy of childhood history that allows me to understand 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 women's history in order to understand how the historically imposed oppressions of gender, race, and class directed them to the need to unite as a group and found an organized movement for the struggle for women's liberation, whose demands and questions guided the beginning of a reflection process about the impacts of literary representations on the formation of the generations of women who grew up reading these stories. From feminist theory, and considering gender as a theoretical tool of literary analysis, I observe how The contemporary Brazilian children's literature has proposed places of female protagonism that break with physical and behavioral stereotypes commonly conditioned to the female. Six feminine-juvenile literary works of female authorship, published in Brazil, were chosen to compose the corpus of this research, they are: A pior princesa do mundo (Anna Kemp, publisher Peace and Earth), Por que só as princesas se dão bem? (Thalita Rebouças, Rocco publisher), 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, publisher EDUFBA). By analyzing them as representative of a contemporary literary and editorial segment, I seek to strengthen the debate about the importance of children's and youth literature for the construction of the imagination, and of a feminist and anti-racist education for the formation of a critical consciousness since childhood.