[ONLINE] University of Aveiro, Portugal

October 21, 22 and 23 2020

“The Erased Gender”: The Exclusion of the Debate on Female Bodies in the School and its Consequences

Samara Andrade
Viviane Bispo
Yasmin Dias

The formation of being a woman in today’s society is full of fears, insecurities and impositions, in parallel to this, more and more women are engaged and seeking to exercise sorority in order to make the formation of women lucid and free.

Based on the assumption that the Brazilian educational system is not an environment conducive to discussions about sexuality and self-knowledge, especially when it comes to the female gender, it was intended to identify how much this absence contributes for women to be unaware of their bodies and to that bad and repressive concepts were widely disseminated and accepted by society as a whole, given their lack of knowledge. In addition, the media influence on female bodies was analyzed in an attempt to whiten due to the beauty standards that lead white women with European features, with more than half of the Brazilian population being configured as black. It is notable that female invisibility affects several injustices that have become legitimized due to structural machismo, thus, the absence of rights affects the female class and is shown through the maintenance of unequal wages, violence against women, imposition of motherhood, sexual repression, etc. To this end, it was conducted through the dissemination of three questionnaires, through social media, a survey of data on topics related to self-esteem, sexual health and the relationship that these themes establish with the school environment. The present article describes a survey conducted among Brazilian women aged 13 to 61 years, of different races/skin color, with incomes ranging from none to more than 15 minimum wages and of different sexualities. After analyzing the responses, which totaled approximately 611, it was found that the demands related to the female gender such as low self-esteem, imposition of the media and sexuality are problems experienced on a large scale and that with the absence of school participation there is confirmation that despite having evolved a lot in different areas of science, issues related to women continue to be invisible.

Keywords: Women; Educational system; Bodies; Genre; Sexuality