Girls aged 12-15 in a Brazilian working-class neighborhood: gender, sexuality, reputation

Abstract

This research aims to describe and analyze different styles of femininity identified among adolescent girls (12 to 15 years old) in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city of Campinas. Bearing in mind that the school institution appears as central to the construction of the studied group's femininity, the aim is to understand the place that school education and the school occupy in their trajectories. The research is anchored in an ethnography developed with girls, mostly between the ages of 12 and 15, for whom issues related to sexuality begin to be part of everyday life, in different ways and to different degrees. The field research was carried out in two stages. In a first stage, meetings designed as an alternative to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic were held with a group of seven girls aged between 12 and 17, ballet students. The second stage was carried out in a municipal school in the territory, in which I carried out participant observation and interviews with 33 girls. I articulate the situations observed in the field mainly with two sets of studies: anthropological research on the construction of femininity in popular environments and research in sociology and anthropology of education on gender and school education. The internship abroad aims to enable the discussion of the data produced with other researchers and to improve the theoretical paths for the development of the research. (AU)