GENDER HIERARCHIES, CHRISTIANITY, AND SCHOOL EDUCATION: thinking about the cape verdean context

This article aims to reflect on gender issues in Cape Verde, a former European colony. Problematizing this perspective is important because in colonization contexts, essentialist, hierarchical, and deterministic conceptions are observed, which have been established around Westernized views of gender. In these conceptions, the idea of sex and gender has been naturalized, along with the asymmetrical relationships that permeate them, resulting in violence in various configurations. Conceptions of sex and gender are socially established through processes of signification and hierarchization of the biological body, upon which social functions based on sex are designated. In this context, this article aims to understand the influence that Christianity practiced in Cape Verde has on the process of gender naturalization and, therefore, on the naturalization of asymmetrical relationships, as well as its influence on silencing these issues in Cape Verdean schools, including in its education system. To achieve the proposed objective, we opted for a bibliographic review from a qualitative perspective as a methodological resource. As a result, it is expected that this work will contribute, in a general sense, to a reflection, especially in the Cape Verdean context, on gender issues in order to create and strengthen networks that work towards destabilizing the naturalistic and cisheteronormative perspective of gender that has conditioned social inequalities and, consequently, social instability. In this sense, it is hoped, above all, that this work will contribute as an element for thinking about how public and educational policies have incorporated and dealt with the issue of gender in Cape Verde.