AMONG ERASED NAMES AND SILENCED CURRICULA: WOMEN IN BASIC EDUCATION, FROM COMPLAINT TO ANNOUNCEMENT

Abstract

This chapter discusses how women are addressed in Basic Education curricula, taking the Municipal Education Network of São Paulo as its main horizon and connecting memory, professional experience, gender studies, curriculum theory, intersectionality, decoloniality, and emancipatory education. It is based on the understanding that curriculum is not a neutral selection of knowledge, but a historical, political, and cultural territory in which subjects, memories, knowledge, and experiences are defined as worthy—or unworthy—of recognition. The reflection is also rooted in the recovery of the names Maria de Jesus and Belarmina Maria de Jesus, the author's maternal great-grandmothers, whose partially erased histories prompted questions about the mechanisms that silence women in family memory and social narratives. Drawing on Joan Scott, Guacira Lopes Louro, José Gimeno Sacristán, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Lélia Gonzalez, María Lugones, Sueli Carneiro, bell hooks, Carole Pateman, Cláudia Vianna, Paulo Freire, and Célestin Freinet, the chapter argues that curriculum transformation requires more than adding female figures to existing narratives: it requires examining the power relations that define which women appear, how they are represented, and which women remain invisible. Finally, the movement from denunciation to announcement is proposed as an ethical, political, and formative horizon for building plural, intersectional, decolonial curricula committed to human rights, the prevention of violence, and the recognition of women as subjects of memory, knowledge, and social transformation.