CONTESTED MASCULINITIES: A Study with Teachers from the Federal District (DF), Brazil
Gender, Masculinities, Teacher, Resentment
This research stems from the idea of examining how a potentially sexist or misogynistic culture manifests within schools. It seeks to understand how male teachers—who work daily alongside many women as peers—permit themselves to engage in sexist and misogynistic behaviors, as well as how teaching masculinities are constructed and maintained in everyday school life. Preliminary interviews suggest that the institutional culture in schools remains strongly influenced by binary thinking and traditional gender roles. Within this framework, the study’s objectives are: (1) to identify who these men in the teaching profession are; (2) to explore why they feel entitled to exhibit misogynistic behaviors that harm their female colleagues (investigating the implicit, deep-seated cultural norms that enable this); (3) to analyze which types of masculinities come into play in daily interactions among colleagues; and (4) to determine whether this phenomenon represents a conservative resurgence or an intensification of hegemonic masculinity. The study proposes a qualitative, cartographic approach to working with teachers, aiming to discern whether male teachers, on average, have adopted a stance of "reclaiming" conservative gender values—positioning themselves through a discourse marked by resentment toward masculinity and their perceived social role.