Otras prestaciones de la Seguridad Social

In the three following chapters I analyse my data drawing on the notion of situated learning.

‘Learning the right knowledge’ – a phrase I often heard in the field – guides me in the

analysis whereby I look at what youth learned in informal spaces like the family and media, and what was considered as ‘the right knowledge’. In my interviews and informal discussions, parents, educational authorities and teachers, spiritual leaders and clerics as well as traditional healers maintained that young people should be ‘learning the right knowledge’. It seemed, however, that different people had different perspectives on what ‘the right knowledge’ was, yet they shared some ideas in common. For example, Baba Joaquin, the spiritual leader who led the initiation rites in the area of Beira, considered traditional knowledge necessary for young people to acquire (see Chapter 6). Similarly, parents appeared to perceive young people as ‘conservadores’ (Interview: Beira, 01/09/09) – conservators of traditions; persisting gender identities and traditional norms and beliefs. Some teachers, however, were concerned about young people who ‘lived in two different

worlds’ and how the ideas taught in the home contrasted with what they learned at school.

Clearly, it was difficult for some teachers to find the balance in addressing this gap. These complex issues made me wonder what actually constituted ‘the right knowledge’; Is it reproducing the gender identity and beliefs governing the community? What are the implications of ‘learning the right knowledge’ for identity construction processes? Who decides what ‘the right knowledge’ is? How do people (particularly young people) acquire ‘the right knowledge’? And who disputes ‘the right knowledge’? I also wondered where young people acquired ‘the right knowledge’. For all these reasons ‘learning the right

knowledge’ provided an important perspective for the social construction of gender and

sexual identities in the analysis of my data.

This chapter needs to be understood in the context of social relations: family and kinship relations, marriage and sexual practices discussed in Chapter 2. As emphasised earlier, the family has a central place in the research context – as it does in wider society – and plays a determining role in the learning processes of children and young people. Having this in mind, I explore the kind of ‘right knowledge’ that adults believed young people learned in the

family realm, and how the young people viewed gender relations based on their own experience. Although learning is understood in this paper as a continuum, the idea of unstructured informal learning in the family was a useful discrete entry point for examining ‘the right knowledge’ which was learned through the family. Informal learning, as in the family context, involves exploration and everyday experience. Learning in the context of my research, for example through rites of passage, was seen as preparation for life, mainly for the new generation. This use of the category of informal learning was helpful for understanding the ways in which learning happens in families.

Listening to the young people and adults opened my eyes to a number of issues that I would have never known about if I had not engaged with their lives and their stories. Throughout the process of researching gender abuse I realised that in order to get the whole picture it is also necessary to acknowledge the complexity of gender relations among members of the fieldwork area, as what happens in schools reflects these relationships in the local community. Focusing on interfamilial relations allowed me to examine how (young) people actively create – and sometimes challenge – new gender structures and meanings as suggested by McNay (2000). The emerging new forms of autonomy and constraint (McNay, 2000) indicate that young people generate new ideas about gender relations. My analysis rests within the framework of social institutions (Kabeer, 1999) that are persistent sets of practices, learning processes, power relations, norms, interactional dynamics and ideologies. According to Arnfred relations of seniority are not well investigated and theorisations are not developed, thus the analysis may contribute with some new views on ‘hierarchies of age’ (1995: 13). Following the concepts of subjectification examined in Chapter 4, I will consider how gender and sexual identities are an ongoing ‘product’ of everyday social practices through the material and symbolic aspects of subjectification (McNay, 2000).

In the second part of this chapter I discuss the role of the media in young people’s lives. I examine what they saw themselves learning from the media, particularly from Brazilian soap operas. Drawing on the idea of informal learning (see Chapter 4) I look at how informal sources of information can be engaging and interesting, and what kind of knowledge young girls and boys acquire from them. I also look at how the access to new means of information such as television and informal groups influenced their ideas and the construction of their identities and what possible tensions they created in social relations, particularly in relations with adults.

126 To explore these issues in depth I use data from my focus group discussions with young people, adults/parents and workshops with young teacher trainees. In my analysis I consider the twofold objective of these activities as well as the power dynamics between the adults and young participants. I reflect upon the range of views and perspectives of the data and what voices may be missing and why.

5.1 Gender and sexuality construction in the family and community

Living in the local community made me aware of the assigned gender roles across the community and among family members. Despite emerging changes in the social relations I have discussed earlier (see Chapter 2), certain gender stereotypes seemed to be persisting within the family reflecting cultural practices, traditional values and belief systems. As explored in Chapter 4 (section 4.2), gender functions as an organising principle for society regarding the cultural meanings prescribed to a female and a male. Gender and sexual identities are established across social institutions from an early age. Boys and girls rapidly learn their respective identities as female and male. Gender norms, perpetuated by family, community, and other social institutions such as initiation rites, construct identities, as discussed in Chapter 4. Gender norms as viewed by most of the elderly people in the research site shape girls to be hardworking, obedient and submissive. With age, girls’ responsibilities in the household became greater and their time is increasingly spent in and around the household space. Already during childhood a young boy learns that he has authority over a woman and household, and that he is responsible for their support. It is important for boys to know what it entails to be a responsible leader and acabeça da família (head of the family).

As they grow up, boys undertake more activities requiring strength, such as house construction and working on the machamba and the amount of time they spend on domestic chores decreases, usually offloaded onto female siblings and the wife (or wives) after marriage. These gender roles meant that the ‘right knowledge’ consisted, for girls, of learning how to cook and clean and run a household successfully, and for boys, how to be a household head and leader. However, some of the participants, especially young people, challenged these normative and entrenched ideas of gender roles and identities suggesting new views and ideas about gender, and what, therefore, constituted the ‘right knowledge’ for boys and girls to learn.

As examined in Chapter 4 the social construction of sexual identity is strongly rooted in factors that shape female and male identity. Their representation and how they are

constructed rest on values and norms about social and sexual relations, which are perpetuated through social customs. Beliefs constructed at various points in life whether within the family domain and/or through initiation rites or other community customs determine the social expectations of both men and women in the sphere of sexuality.

In Chapter 1 (section 1.2) I looked at rites of passage as important means of learning that introduce young people to sexual and reproductive life, among other life skills such as: constructing a hut, looking after children and elderly, cultivating land etc. The rituals must take place before marriage in the form of group or individual rites of passage. As I further explore in Chapter 6, seen in the context of a ‘gendered worlds’ (Arnfred, 1995) paradigm the initiation rites train young men to handle their future sexual life with virility through the expression and exercise of dominance and power. For a woman, the purpose of the initiation is to acquire sexual competence in order to be fully capable female members of community (and wider society) to learn to respond docilely and passively and to satisfy the demands of her partner. In this way a girl learns that the centre of her sexual life lies in establishing a social relationship with another lineage, in the possibility of capturing a high lobolo and in the reproduction of her husband’s family (Loforte, 2003). However, as Arnfred (2011) argues, developing female sexual competence is not merely in order to please a man; women also seem to stress their own sexual pleasure. Drawing on the conceptualisations of Bourdieu (1977) the body is a public object formed through discourses and social practices. In the field context sexuality (and its expression) occurs within the pattern of values that guide how the local patrilineal community was structured and defined. Thus initiation rites teach young people what is expected of them as men and women, constructing their gender identities and giving them the ‘right knowledge’ to join their communities as adults.

Before moving on to examine what the young people considered ‘right knowledge’ and what they thought they had learned in their family and community, I look at what adults saw as ‘the right knowledge’ that young people should acquire in the family domain.

I organised a focus group discussion in the local bairro with a group of three women and three men. The participants represented different ages, marital status and occupations; one of the women (Woman 3) was 35 and married with four sons, educated to eighth grade and was looking for an administrative job: the other two (Woman 1 and Woman 2) were 25 years old, had a limited education (five years) and each had three children. They did not seem to have any aspirations to work professionally. All the men had a job; one was a carpenter (Man 3),

128 was in his mid 40s and had a wife and three children: the other two (Man 1 and Man 2) were in their 30s, both with two children, and did casual work when they could find it such as unloading lorries, carrying heavy sacks of corn and of flour at the market or working on construction sites. The focus group discussion was organised at the bairros community centre. The discussion was carried out in this mixed group, which had implications for the group’s dynamics, as I explain later in this section. My focus here was on what adults considered ‘the right knowledge’ for young people to acquire and what should be learned in the family. The participants were asked to draw on their own experience and give examples from their own relationships. As I analyse the focus group discussion I also look at the dynamics of the group.

In the table below I present their views of the characteristics of gender roles that young people should learn within the family realm.

Table 5.1 Learning in the family

Women’s views Men’s views