Relations between genders in traditional, critical and post-critical curricular theorization

Abstract

This research deals with the relations between gender and education, especially on gender and curriculum, in order to understand the place occupied by gender social relations in curricular theorization. This is a theoretical research that sought support in three different phases that form the field of study on the curriculum and in the field of study gender. The research takes as an object of analysis the assumptions of curricular theorization – traditional, critical and post-critical – in its emergency and development contexts, with a view to identifying distances and approaches between curriculum and gender in these studies. The results show that although the school curriculum has always been crossed by gender relations, such relationships have been absent from traditional or non-critical theorization because of its linkage with the paradigm of technical-scientific rationality and the consequent thesis of the neutrality and objectivity of the curriculum. They were also absent from the initial phase of critical theorization, because of its centrality in the social class category. They are inserted in the curricular discourse in the second phase of this theorization based on the understanding that culture, as a constituted and constituent element of differences, is also an institution of inequalities, among which include gender inequalities. Thus, critical theorizing, through the resistance chain, announces the crossing of the curriculum by the differences of gender and ethnicity among others, approaching the multiculturalist perspective. Post-critical theorizing, by attributing centrality to language, points to new ways of looking at the relations between gender and education, more specifically between curriculum and gender.