Representações sociais de gênero e práticas de socialização de pais religiosos cristãos

Abstract

Beliefs, values and social expectations regarding what is appropriate for men and women are widely disseminated in the social environment and interfere in the way boys and girls are educated. Whether in the family or in other reference groups, such as religion, the meanings attributed to gender often gain the status of natural, being incorporated into everyday life, transmitted in social relationships and understood as unquestionable. Knowing how different groups understand this issue and how it relates to their practices can contribute to studies from a psychosociological perspective. Therefore, this work, which is theoretically anchored in the Theory of Social Representations, has the general objective of investigating the social representations of gender among fathers and mothers who declare themselves Christian religious and their relationship with the gender socialization practices adopted and described by them. The instrument used in this study was qualitative in nature, with the application of 20 semi-structured interviews, carried out with 10 fathers and 10 mothers of children aged between 0 and 10 years, residing in the state of Espírito Santo. The participants were couples, five evangelicals and five Catholics. The semi-structured interview script was composed of 25 questions, divided between 1) representation of gender, 2) characterization and roles of men and women in society and 3) raising children. In addition to the interview, a sociodemographic questionnaire was also applied. Data processing and analyzes were carried out using the IRAMUTEQ software (Interface de R pour les Analyzes Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires) in two stages: firstly, covering the complete interviews of the 20 participants; and then, considering only specific questions about gender socialization, in order to obtain more detailed results in accordance with the specific objectives proposed. Thus, the data obtained through the interviews were separated into two corpora: corpus 1, composed of the interviews of all participants in full, and corpus 2, created from the responses of all participants to specific questions about gender socialization. The data was analyzed by Iramuteq using Descending Hierarchical Analysis (CHD). Corpus 1 generated six classes and corpus 2 resulted in five classes, analyzed later in the discussion presented. The results of the present study, in general terms, identified social representations of gender linked to the roles traditionally played by men and women in society. In the case of a Christian sample, it was observed that these roles are interconnected with God's will and that they were established in the light of the Bible to be fulfilled. Therefore, parents consider it important that these roles are known and taught to children from childhood. Between evangelical and Catholic couples, differences were found in the way gender issues are approached in church meetings/activities, but both groups recognized that religion positively interferes in the way parents educate their children in terms of gender. From the perspective of gender socialization, it was identified that games play an important socializing role. The results indicate that parents differentiate games for boys and girls in terms of functions to be performed by children in adulthood (knowing how to drive, being a good housewife, being vain, being a worker, etc.) or physical characteristics and/or or expected and desired behaviors for boys and girls, such as strength, brutality, for the former, and delicacy and vanity, for the latter. With the research, we hope to contribute to studies whose themes involve issues of gender socialization, especially in the educational sphere of children and the understanding of how religion relates to this process.