Construção das identidades de gênero na infância: os discursos dos brinquedos e brincadeiras

Abstract

This research aims at analyzing the interaction between the children of the Creche Comunitária Sorriso de Criança, as well as the gender meanings that emerge from toys and games during childhood contribute to the construction of their gender identities. Play and toys are part of children's culture and, understood as a symbolic system, contribute to the process of socialization and the formation of gender identities. We start from the point of view that the interactions established by children are part of the list of objective and subjective experiences that are creating their identities, as well as gender social roles. The study was characterized as being of the ethnographic type. The technique used was the participant observation to analyze the interaction between 15 children of a group of 3 and 4 year olds, with educators and with toys and games. It was possible to perceive that the experiences among the children are crossed by performative discourses of gender. It has been shown in the interactions that, even among young children, gender roles are very close to those lived by adults living in the same social and cultural context, and toys and games tend to reproduce the roles of masculinity and normative femininity, experienced in different spaces of interaction between children and between children and adults, both in the family and in the Creche Comunitária Sorriso de Criança.