Joan W. Scott Research Papers (original) (raw)

This article presents a research that aimed at understanding how dance classes can be set up as a space for gendering experiences. To approach it, the concept of gender is used. By analyzing observations carried out on dance classes of PIBID project, as developed by Universidade Estadual do Rio Grande do Sul (RS, Brazil), reflections approach the scenes in which gender relations are constituted, and implied on thinking and creating dance. Results show that there are hierarchies between male and female students in the context of dance classes, as well as gendered ways of organizing dance practices, although some changes in the way teachers intervene have already started. This article is based on a research that was developed with the goal of observing and analyzing body gendering constitution and subject positions of male and female students, following the school syllabus of the early years of elementary school. In the research, classes were taught by undergraduates of a university level Teaching Training Program in Dance. These teachers work for the Institutional Program of Teaching Grants (PIBID in the Portuguese acronym) at Campus Montenegro II of Universidade Estadual do Rio Grande do Sul, RS, Brazil. First, the concept of gender is presented. Then, focus is on the relation between dance and education. Next, research methodology, field, and goals are presented. Finally, results of observations carried out during classes of teachers-to-be who were subscribed to the teaching foundations program in 2017 are presented. By analyzingsome everyday microscopic situations in dance classes, my goal is to dimension gender as part of the schooling process for male and female students. 1. The Concept of Gender: For the purposes of this article, gender means the cultural construct of meaning, symbols and norms that originate-masculinities‖ and-femininities‖ (Scott 1995; Butler 2010; Louro 2007).Therefore, gender is different from-sex‖, as this term is used in natural sciences to designate biological differences between men and women, thus referring to socio-cultural differences (Scott 1995; Louro 2007).It is then a concept that operates by-rejecting the biological determinism that is implicit in the terms ‗sex' and ‗sexual difference'.‖ (Scott 1995, 72). For Butler (2010), the subject of gender is an effect, produced by repeating acts that correspond to social and cultural norms. Thus, gender is not the expression of what men and women are in essence, but the very cultural performance that allows for the maintenance of such norms. These norms, on their turn, establish a binary opposition in our culture, based on a-fallocentric‖ cultural logic:the dichotomy and hierarchy between-masculinity‖ and-femininity‖. For example, fallocentrism was already present in Aristotle, who expressed a common and widespread conception in the ancient Greek world: that women were men whose development was halted before being finished, rendering them unable to achieve their perfect form because the cold maternal womb subdued the father's warm seed (Correia 2004, 31). Until the eighteenth century, in Medicine, women were understood to be lesser men. The womb was the female scrotum; ovaries were testicles, the vulva was the foreskin, and a vagina was in fact a penis, all inside out. Thus conceived as inverted men, women were less developed and less perfect organisms. Male anatomy was the model of perfection (Laqueur 2001). Hegemonic representations of gender, as heritage to such cultural logic, conceive of masculitinies and femininities as polar, where the masculine end is worthier. Besides, in our civilization, gender is governed by the cultural logic of heteronormativity (Butler 2010). Such assumption, that heterossexuality is-normal‖, and thus any other kind is a deviation, is a gender regulation mechanism that gives birth to homophobic behavior. Homophobia is described by Britzman as-the obsession with normalizing sexuality, by means of discourse that describes homoerotic affairs as deviation‖ (Britzman 1996, 79).