Making the revolution together: Challenging gender stereotypes in secondary technical schools in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

ANALÍA INÉS MEO; MARIANO CHERVIN

Milán

Congreso; 11th European Feminist Research Conference. Social Change in a Feminist Perspective: Situating Gender Research in Times of Political Contention.; 2022

University of Milano-Bicocca, Milán, Italia

This article analyzes the experiences of Recargadas ("Reloaded"), a group of female teachers and students that aims "to make the revolution" in secondary technical schools by challenging androcentric stereotypes by which hard orientations (such as mechanics and automotive) are male domains. "Recargadas" is the only female team that encompasses girls and women of different generations from different technical schools in the city of Buenos Aires. This group was created in 2018 to participate in a national electric cars race for technical schools organized by a state own oil entreprise. This competition aims to promote learning in a variety of school subjects. This paper argues that girls and women ―working together in the creation of the car and the participation in the race, supporting each other and navigating conflicts amongst them and with others― challenge mandates and prejudices that have historically organized labor and pedagogical dynamics within the taller (workshop). It should be noted that the taller is a distinctive space of technical schools and, in particular, of specialities such as mechanics, automotive and metallurgy. We map different strategies of subversion and resistance of practices and sensibilities that have produced the "taller" as a masculinized and androcentric space, where female have been defined as something strange and abject. Our fieldwork was carried out in 2020 and 2021. It encompasses virtual collective and individual interviews with teachers and students from "Recargadas". This paper also examines policy documents and revisits interviews with male teachers of technical schools carried out in a previous research.