Abstract:
This dissertation seeks to reflect on institutionalization of gender and sexuality
differences and inequalities at school. With Michel Foucault (1926-1984), we
will see how there are different mechanisms of power that make up and sustain
modern society; we will see the dispositive of sexuality as a technology of
biopolitical control – a biopower capable of controlling life and managing bodies.
We will seek to understand how this control is present in power networks at
school, and is established in differences and inequalities, both in the personal
aspect and as social and political. We used bibliographical research aligned
with the post-structuralist perspective with contributions to education. As a
methodological procedure, we used the strategy of cultural studies, which
allowed us to examine cultural practices and the material and symbolic power
relations that permeate and involve human beings. This method enabled us to
visualize and problematize the modes and meaning of bodies in issues of
gender and sexuality, that is, the production of identities and the hierarchy of
bodies and identities that are intrinsic to them. Our work is organized into three
chapters. In the first, we will address considerations about power relations,
domination over the lives of subjects from power devices created by society
itself: biopower and biopolitics. From power relations, we will discuss the device
of sexuality and the discipline of bodies. In the second chapter, we will analyze
how differences are constructed and how identities are composed, seeking to
establish relationships between gender, sexuality and power; we will analyze
how power is established and imprinted on body through cultural and plural
processes. In the third chapter, we will see how the school production of
differences is processed, and the effects they have on subjects and their forms,
either through the schooling of bodies and minds, or through sexism and
homophobia in educational practice. Finally, we conclude that the bodies that
are evident as docile, will be able to resist and thus interfere in power games,
with knowledge, love and courage.