Social Identities, Prejudices, and Exclusion: The Reproduction of Social (In)Visibility in School Contexts

Abstract

From a cultural psychology framework, the chapter will focus on the social mechanisms that promote the (in)visibility of different groups in Brazilian society. In this chapter, we conceive identity processes and prejudices as boundary phenomena, culturally constructed, and we explore their concrete implications in daily life. Issues related to the construction of non-hegemonic social identities will be analyzed with special attention to gender, sexual orientation, and ethnic-racial belonging. In order to explore the mechanisms that promote the visibility of some groups and invisibility of other groups, this chapter will focus on the contributions of the Anthropology of the Senses, proposed by Le Breton (2016), especially the analysis on the “sense of sight”. After all, the construction of different social identities always involves embodied and affective processes. Besides, that, there are complex mechanisms of cultural canalization of the sense of sight which, frequently, present deep connections, within stereotypes. The authors share the conviction that these issues should be explored by psychology, in order to contribute with the deconstruction of the multiple prejudices and discriminatory practices that exclude and provoke psychological suffering in many people in diverse societies around the world. At the end of the chapter, some empirical examples are analyzed. The empirical examples were extracted from qualitative researches done by the second and the third authors, under the supervision of the first author.