Gender relations and violence against women in “Isaltina Campo Belo”, by Conceição Evaristo: a reading experience in high school

Abstract

This paper investigates as it happens the reception of literaty texts that emphasize the relations and gender violences, by eleventh grade high school students at a state school in the city of Bom Jardim, Pernambuco. The experience from which our reflections arise is a product derived from research carried out with the Postgraduate Program in Teacher Training at the State University of Paraíba (UEPB). Methodologically, this study is part of the action-research category and took place between August and December 2022. Our research involved reading six short stories that focus on gender violence, from the perspective of the formation of literary and cultural readers (Gomes, 2011, 2015). However, in this paper, we only focus on the set of procedures applied to reading the short story “Isaltina Campo Belo”. To this end, we took as a basis studies focused on the field of reader formation and literature teaching, such as Candido (2004), Lajolo (1988), Zilberman (1986, 2012) and Ferrarezi Jr. and Carvalho (2017). The results of the experiment demonstrate that the literary text, being a meeting of diverse human experiences, contributes significantly to the work with the theme of gender relations and violence against women, as it can sensitize subjects and, consequently, awaken them cultural awareness, so that these same subjects can become agents of questioning and transforming of the social structures that encourage gender asymmetries and violence.