Civic-military schools in Brazil as patriarchal, white supremacist, and queerphobic project

• In Event: Making visible the unseen: Interrogating Education in Latin America through Feminist and Intersectional Lenses

Proposal

Brazil has witnessed the development of numerous conservative and anti-feminist policies in education over the past decade, as part of a global trend. We investigate the agents involved in implementing this agenda and the arguments they use to gain support. We have analyzed 231 excerpts from online posts, talks, and videos through thematic analysis (Braun; Clark, 2006). Results show that while the anti-gender agenda is central to these movements, leading to authoritarian measures like book bans and attacks on curricula for diversity, there is also a significant presence of neoliberal arguments. This characterizes the discourse of "conservative modernization" in education (Apple, 2003). This paper focuses on militarization of public schools specifically, an educational policy driven by neoliberal discourse emphasizing the improvement of quality and standardized test outcomes. We use a feminist perspective to uncover underlying patriarchal, White supremacist, and queerphobic ideologies.
Civic-military schools are non-militarized institutions with retired military agents as educational managers and/or monitors. During Jair Bolsonaro’s federal administration, this policy was promoted as a “successful” strategy to restore good results, safety and neutrality in Brazilian public education - something they claim to be lost “because of the democratization of education”, in Bolsonaro’s words (2019). Without a specific political-pedagogical project, the policy was characterized by the "infiltration" of military agents into school spaces, promising discipline and funds to improve schools’ structure and materials - a sum that was not fully delivered.
Despite the anti-gender discourse not being explicitly contemplated in the arguments used to defend this policy, documents regulating militarized schools reveal emphasis on adjusting behaviors to traditional gender roles, perpetuating a patriarchal, cis-heteronormative, and police-like culture. Dress codes and rules disproportionately target girl students, disregarding diversity in school communities, including gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, and sexual orientation. Strict standards and sanctions stifle individuality, diversity, multiculturalism and the free circulation of ideas and beliefs.
Brazilian Black feminists have been historically denouncing the deep connections of Brazilian society and culture with sexism and racism (Gonzalez, 1984; Bento, 2022,). The myth of a racial democracy has been dismantled by them together with the necessary understanding of the particularly vulnerable position in which Black women are put when the dynamics of gender, race and class encounter. Black people (Black women especially) are frequently domesticated by Whiteness, framed in images of control (Collins, 2019). This policy has shown effects in that direction.
Civic-military schools face complaints of harassment and racism. Examples include a Black female student barred for her curly hair and female students reporting monitor harassment. Considering the discourse of discipline as a way to improve education, it is not a coincidence that these are the subjects that need domestication for the conservative agenda. Disguised as a concern with quality, neutrality and order (“modernization”), relies on the anti-feminist, anti-Black and queerphobic conservative understanding that public school students (mostly lower-class Black children and youth) “should know their places”.

Authors

• Bruna Dalmaso-Junqueira, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

• Iana Gomes de Lima, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul