"Divenir donne". L'educazione informale di genere nei racconti di formazione

In the pedagogical field, the need for helping young generations in the composition of their gender subjectivity has been highlighted. The main aim is to provide them useful means to deconstruct heteronimy and dependence conditions and to stimulate the identification and development of the various differences gender can take on. The intentionality of educational projects nevertheless remains far from the educational processes which inform gender learning and lie in educational experiences defined by pedagogical research as informal and widespread. This happens in the overall lack of a general gender culture in Italy where gender statistics reveal the persistence of significant gaps in different core areas of life (family life, employment and wage, violence). Within this frame research meant to collect and examine different gender formation stories of some young women; we investigated the traces and peculiarities of informal educational experiences composing the aforementioned stories and studied the attributions of meaning which these young women refer to their experiences. Our research, in the light of the gender-sensitive approach, aims at the adoption of qualitative, narrative methodologies. Biographical material was directed to the collection of formation stories of the young women involved in the study (12 women, aged between 19 and 23) and to the exploration of their spontaneous theories about gender. The recurrences identified in the collected material allowed us to detect some possible traces of informal and diffuse upbringing by means of the gender disadvantage and to investigate (informal) didactics and contents. Echoes of this disadvantage were also found in the modalities by which the young women thought and shaped their experience and in the way the conceived their gender construct. In spite of the fact that all the accounts consciously hint at the presence of a less traditional (binary and heterosexual) and more complex gender order, the significations about gender and gender-related experiences do not appear to question the dominant conceptualizations, rather reaffirming interpretations (mainly naturalizing and psychologising ones) which just probate and normalise nevertheless exposed differences and imbalances. In those, rare, cases when gender is conceived as a social construction, the burden given to cultural bonds like absence or impracticability of options (material and symbolic) appears to potentially affect the self-legitimisation of wishes, opportunities, choices and perceived experiences upstream; against social destiny. Idiographic focus allowed to identify some experience dimensions where the agency of some of the women involved in the study was supported and appraised. The pragmatic orientation which informed the research and motivated the attention for contemporaneity and the young women living it, characterizes the obtained results as a possible functionality which makes this study a contribution to the knowledge and understanding of gender construction stories and a possible preparatory basis for the definition of dedicated educational projects.