Cultural construction in gender studies in Brazil

Abstract

This article has the objective of discussing Gender Studies and its cultural construction in Brazil, alongside Heritage Studies. We have chosen to bring to the fore the women artisans of Jequitinhonha Valley because this case study brings essential elements about the construction of female and male local identities in a fluid point of view connected with social, cultural, historical heritage, space and craft issues. The ceramist women of the region let us notice the elastic element in identities that are not marked at all. The exchange of social and gender roles is constant, regardless of the much crystalized "community pater familias” that consolidates sex as a determinant of well-marked and sectorized functions. In the case of artisan ceramist women of Jequitinhonha region, there are breakings of paradigms, boundaries, asymmetrical barriers, function, craft, and gender construction, oscillating between the paternalist traditionalism of fixed functions and the fluid and dynamic social system of the daily economic demands.