The closet of the literary canon in High School: what literary education and official documents show

Abstract

Considering the presence of authors or works starring LGBTQIA+ characters in Brazilian literature,
canonical or not, the absence of these literatures in High School classrooms is questionable. Through
analysis of official documents, such as literary lists of university admission exams, the Common National
Curricular Base and the National Textbook Plan, and interviews with six teachers from two schools, a
public one in São Paulo Metropolitan Region and a upper class private school in the city of São Paulo,
the objective is to evaluate how the diversity of gender and sexuality appears in literature classes and
how the normalization mechanisms on this issue, theorized by Guacira Lopes Louro (2018), operate in
the school environment. Therefore, we collected data regarding which works are studied, how they are
presented to the students, the resistances and difficulties of the teachers, and their prior preparation to
discuss LGBTQIA+ issues in the classroom. As a result, a scarce literary corpus of works that value gender and sexuality differences in Basic Education was observed, in addition to a lack of these debates
in teacher education.