Representations of Women in Visual-Linguistc Materialities in High School Portuguese Textbooks

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the social representations of women in Portuguese Textbooks (LDP) distributed in high school programs of state schools and selected based on the Guide of the National Textbook Program (PNLD) 2018. To this end, we draw from the field of Discourse Analysis, more specifically, from Foucault’s postulates (2009, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016) in dialogue with the notion of “gender identity”, by Louro (1997, 2008). The corpus of analysis is comprised of visual-linguistic texts collected from the three most chosen collections of high school textbooks by schools of Minas Gerais State. Based on the analyses, we found that the corpus presents visual-linguistic texts that foster possible questions about normalized gender representations for women. However, we could perceive that most of the scenes portray previously normalized roles based on the traditional model of asymmetric gender relations. Therefore, in this paper we present other interpretations of the visual-linguistic materialities of LDPs, outlining possible practices of sexism confrontation in Portuguese language teaching and learning.

Keywords

• portuguese textbook
• discourse
• gender identity