Technologies of gender, device of infantilization, advance of literacy: conflict in the production of gendered bodies

Abstract

Due to the expansion of primary education, six-year-old children have experienced differentiated power-knowledge relations. During an investigation carried out using ethnographic techniques coordinated with Foucauldian discourse analysis in a class of the first year of primary education of a public school of Belo Horizonte city, in Minas Gerais state, it was possible to notice that, among such new relations of power-knowledge, the ones that coordinated advance of literacy (it advocates that children must be literate by the end of the 1st year of schooling), the device of infantilization and technologies of gender stood out. In view of such coordination, this article aims to discuss how the production of gendered bodies in this curriculum occurs. It is argued that the combination of the device of infantilization with technologies of gender is operationalized in the curriculum that works with the advance of literacy by means of techniques of distinction (which separate “boys’ stuff from girls’ stuff”, usually infantilizing them) and accountability techniques (which place responsibility on teachers, students and families to a take certain functions in view of their gender) with implications both in the literacy process and in the construction of the gender of boys, girls and teachers.