Rethinking gender prisons from a "visit ìntima": film storyline to life

Abstract

This article seeks to reflect on one of the activities developed in the Thematic Seminars I, offered to students of Social Service at the University Tiradentes and is developed from the combination of three main themes: Culture and Subjectivity; Gender and Race/Ethnicity and Social Assistance, Poverty and Social Exclusion. Although generally use the same texts for discussion by highlighting the interaction between the themes focused, some students find it difficult to grasp the correlation between membership of a particular ethnic group and gender, and the construction process of multiple subjectivities in contemporary culture. The short film Intimate Visit was used to identify the process of building students’ subjective about what it is being a man and being a woman, and that social and sexual roles are culturally assigned to women and men. Therefore, we prepared four questions that should be answered after accessing the movie on their computers, the website www.portacurtas.com.br. Despite having assimilated the theoretical point of view that there is no essence in the performance of social and sexual roles, the subjective constructions of students demonstrate that they would not be able to stage another drama once naturalize social and sexual roles assigned to men and women culturally. It is appears that women in the documentary as the spectators, reaffirm the ethos of romantic love, validated by the unequal division of romantic roles between men and women.