Politics of Curricular Erasure: Debates on Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Brazilian "Common Core"

• In Event: Theorizing From the Intersections: Understanding Education Policies and Practices Through Critical Feminist Theories

Abstract

The first panelist will examine how race, gender, and sexuality were contested through a process of curricular revision before the Base Nacional Comum Curricular, the new Brazilian “common core” curriculum known as the BNCC, became federal law in 2017 (Crenshaw 1991). Drawing on interviews with 7 professors who wrote the BNCC curriculum and a document analysis of the four published iterations of the curriculum, the paper employs a critical intersectional feminist lens to examine attempts to erase race, gender, and sexuality within the policy. As Brazilian historians da Silva and Meireles (2017) note, Brazilian curriculum is traditionally marked by “a racist, homophobic, misogynist, male chauvinist formation…These characteristics shape the Brazilian reality experienced by teachers and students, in a contemporary daily life strongly marked by violence, by inequality and its harmful consequences” (10).

When race, gender, and sexuality are considered together in a policy analysis, as opposed to separately as more often occurs, it reveals the ways in which conservative alliances predicated on and united through anti-Blackness, misogyny, and homophobia exert influence on curriculum in an effort to maintain the traditional white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative state. Thus, it is necessary to analyze how these power relations are co-constituted in the terrain of educational policy in order to illuminate what was at stake in each version and in broader national politics.

In the analysis that follows, the paper focuses on what aspects of gender, sexuality and race were contested within the curricular revisions, and, in the end, what was erased and what was included within the final version. It highlights micro-revisions that occurred through the four versions of the document that led to these and other erasures. The findings show that while there were hundreds of micro-revisions regarding different terms and ideas related to race, gender, and sexuality through the four versions, the following occurred. First, there was significant contestation regarding the terms race, racial, racism, Black, and Afro-Brazilian, in particular, between the first and final versions, leading to a decrease in the number of occurrences of these terms within the second and third versions. Due to pressure from Black academics and social movements, by the final version, occurrences of these terms were higher than in the first version. Second, all occurrences of the terms sexual orientation, gender identity, homosexuality, and homophobia were removed by the final version. Only a few references to sexuality with regard to reproduction remained.

This paper ultimately argues that these curricular debates around race, gender, and sexuality leading to the final version of the BNCC were constitutive of, rather than simply a reflection of, broader ideological debates in the country about difference and inequality in the contested history and future of Brazil. The curricular politics of the BNCC are thus a key political terrain for understanding the subsequent election in October 2018 of the ultra-right-wing, nationalist President Jair Bolsonaro, whose election was predicated on anti-Blackness, misogyny, and homophobia in a “conjunctural moment” of steep economic decline, political upheaval, and increasing violence and fear throughout Brazilian society (Hall 1988).

Author

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge