Figura y vestigios de Antinous en la educación física brasileña

Abstract

The proposal for the next project is to analyse the phenomenon of the Body at the College, understood that, as a social construction, producer and reproducer of cultural senses. Most studies on Youth and Education have been concerned about issues related to desertion, the lack of interest, the possibilities of access and retention, social class and type of education, training and its relation to the market of work, but omitting or minimizing analysis regarding the status of youth. In recent years, several studies have begun to investigate how "filters" youth in school and how this institution questions and build youth. The line at which our project is located. The main objective is to observe and discover the characteristics that adopt the corporal practices of youth subjects, transiting the daily life of a privately run religious school in the city of La Plata, analyzing uses and representations that unfold in different sceneries of interaction. It ascribed to the need to analyze the logic of youth acting to understand the new and varied forms of participation in High School level. As the project takes on a provisional nature and not definitive, thus the theoretical lines of this ongoing investigation, expressed in the body of this article, reflect the provisional status of the construction of the research object. Located in the qualitative perspective-ethnographic in principle we should "suspend" any theory to "get into the field", but aware of the impossibility of this methodological principle, we believe appropriate to address some theoretical approaches to "confess" our position and allow us to develop categories, even though flexible, will be put into "dialogue" with reality.

This article aims to analyze a specific form of government of bodies in Brazil. It was established in the beginning of the 20th century, having its fundamental ideas taken from the two earlier works of one of the most distinguished intellectuals of that time, Fernando Azevedo. It is in these books that Azevedo tries to bring the hygienist/eugenic doctrine that had been dominating the European scenario to the national Physical Education. He does so by transplanting scientific-pedagogical principles based on European gymnastic methods to the area and incorporating elements of the Greek and Roman cultures idealized by the humanists of his time. Even though his first book -Da educação física (1915)- is much wider, this analysis has its focus on the second, Antinoüs: estudo da cultura atlética (1919), in which the author takes Antinoüs body image as eugenic reference for the constitution of the national body. I conclude this paper indicating some connections between such government of bodies and the contemporary movement in favor of an active life style.