“Eu não acho o meu corpo feio, mas eu acho que falta”: os discursos de beleza e o cotidiano de meninas estudantes dentro e fora do ambiente escolar

Abstract

The dissertation presented below reflects paths that I have taken since the encounters I had with four female students at Colégio de Aplicação João XXIII. I bring as a research question the discourses of beauty as a point of discussion among female students. I seek to understand, in the girls' narratives, how these beauty discourses involve them and how they deal with the discursive effects that surround them inside and outside the school environment. In addition, I seek to develop in their narratives how the school environment and brazilian education can be involved in enhancing these discourses. These paths arise from discomfort with the controls and processes of subjectivation that have an effect on girls. I understand that beauty becomes the result of discursive and non-discursive practices, and I see this in the narratives developed by the girls. I also realize that the notion of achieving beauty is something consumed by the girls I interviewed, and I demonstrate how we are led to the consumption of beauty throughout the chapters. Perceiving the presence of bodies in the midst of the different educational processes of individuals triggers the action as learning structurers, in addition to allowing us to question how we build our knowledge without the direct action of our bodies in these processes. Because of this, I develop a discussion about resistance, so that, when looking at a perspective in which there are no ways to escape this process of subjectivation and domination of bodies and discourses of beauty, and thinking that all of us will be and are captured by these forms of power, there is indeed the possibility of following other paths. I defend how the school institution can be developed and seen as a form of resistance, and I believe that current school knowledge can act as forms of resistance in these spaces – and outside them.