The homossexuality and the Social Representations: a literature review

uma revisão de literatura

Abstract

The Theory of Social Representations (TRS) constitutes a field of common-sense knowledge, whose purpose is to instrumentalize social groups to deal with non-familiar objects. Based on the premise that the issues surrounding homosexuality still cause estrangement in diverse social contexts, our main objective then was to undertake a literature review about studies that were willing to understand these issues from the point of view of the articulation between sexuality and RS. To do this, we carried out a systematic review focused on publications in national and international journals, between 2004 and 2017, in the databases of the SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library, ProQUEST and the Portal of Periodicals of CAPES, using the keywords: sexuality , social representations; sexuality and social representations. Twenty-two articles were found, most of which were Brazilian works. The results could be grouped in three categories of studies: a) homoafetividade and the constitution of families; b) analysis of prejudice by the TRS; c) sexuality and gender in educational contexts. These results point out that the articles found are mainly based on a qualitative evaluation of the phenomenon, supported by a structural analysis of the RS (Abric, 2003), as well as an effort directed at discourse and content analysis. Few studies have investigated the mute zone of social representations, even though the subject of sexuality presents itself as a socially sensitive object.