Shifting gender relations: childhood and candomblé, contributions to education with young children

Abstract

The present work aims to present part of the data of the tesis of Souza (2016), entitled "Experiences of childhoods with  production of cultures in Ilê Axé Omo Oxé Ibá Latan", in a dialogue with the feminist studies of Louro (2008), Hooks (2013) and Daves (2016) and the perspective of the decolonial researches of Quijano (2005) and Santos (2010) that break with a Eurocentric, binary and Cartesian perspective of gender relations. We emphasize the Yoruba worldview on the question of gender as a quaternary conjunction of principles, whose syntax organizes the categories "aborô", corresponding to the masculine principle; iyabá, to the feminine; "Metá-metá", which circulates simultaneously by the first two, and "laí ibalopô", which stands out and beyond any sexual and gender perspective, but different from the "asexual" category of the Western matrix. However, it has been found that even in a space that subverts the colonized perspective of gender relations in their cosmology, children present practices that bind binary relations that associate the feminine with aspects of submission and reserve the masculine aspects of superiority. As a result, this discourse ends up legitimizing those same characteristics historically attributed to the feminine (delicacy, fragility, inferiority, etc.), as if the masculine was linked to the culture and the feminine to the nature. Considering childhood experiences in Candomblé, with inspiration in the exulic logic described by (Souza, 2016) and the Pedagogia Macunaímica  (Faria, 2002), some possibilities for the construction of decolonizing pedagogies for education with young children are presented.