Gender lessons: Schooling and the reproduction of patriarchy in a Venezuelan town.

Abstract

In the small agricultural town of Timotes located in the Andean region of Venezuela, girls and boys learn to become women and men through gendered social practices which reproduce hierarchical gender arrangements and ideologies I theorize as negligent patriarchy. This dissertation explores the ways Timotense secondary students draw upon, reproduce, and rearrange conflicting local and official gender ideological frameworks as they make sense of their school experiences in constructing their futures as workers, spouses, parents, and citizens inhabiting a relatively prosperous town in times of national crisis. I begin by looking at how negligent patriarchy emerges through and is reproduced in dimorphic gender practices whose locations in and between the street and the house constitute distinct but related gender arrangements in each socio-symbolic place. These gender arrangements are hegemonically reproduced through the force of pena (social pain or embarrassment) and verguenza (shame) as emotions fusing or collapsing moral and normative dimensions of femininity and masculinity. These social sentiments act ideologically to displace relations of domination onto a gendered prestige system based on masculine norms of machismo and feminine norms of servitude, norms which legitimize the practices of masculinity and femininity constituting negligent patriarchal social relations. Through these sentimentalized gender relations--situated social practices made meaningful in relation to the socio-symbolic spatial dichotomies of the street and the house--students and teachers construct the school as a gendered place and the experience of schooling as a complex of gendered practices. But the social meanings of the school and schooling emerge in the conflicts and at times contradictions between these local models and official models of schooling which are based on a distinctly constituted opposition between domestic and public spheres. In the second half of the dissertation I look at the unobvious ways in which school as a gendered place, along with pedagogy, textbook reading, and academic achievement as gendered practices, reproduce and potentially contest, the everyday relations of negligent patriarchy.