Beauty, effort and talent: a brief history of Brazilian women’s soccer in press discourse (original) (raw)

The Soccer Tournament as Beauty Pageant: Eugenic Logics in Brazilian Women's Futebol Feminino

WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2018

This paper uses the case of a soccer tournament in São Paulo, Brazil to elucidate the salience of beauty in the context of commercial sports. Over the past two decades, as women’s soccer has become more popular in Brazil, the physical appearance of soccer players has also changed. I focus on the selection practices of a major tournament in São Paulo to explore the dynamics of “beautification” in women’s soccer. Namely, how does the whitening and feminization of Brazilian women’s athletic bodies illustrate the racial logics that shape beauty? I draw on interviews with players, including the former national team captain, as well as an analysis of media coverage in order to investigate the tournament’s exclusions and to make connections between the decisions of private soccer entrepreneurs and nationalist eugenic legacies. Keywords: beauty, feminization, whitening, women’s soccer, Brazil

Femininities and Masculinities in Brazilian Women's Football: Resistance and Compliance

Football is not only one of the major cultural manifestations of Brazilian society; it is also the pinnacle of the country’s hegemonic masculinity, a bastion into which women should not be allowed. Despite some progress and several international sporting successes achieved over the last few decades, Brazilian female footballers still endure extreme gender prejudice when playing football in Brazil. Gender discrimination blocks their access to minimal conditions of football training and playing at recreational and competitive levels. This paper aims to discuss gender issues that pervade Brazilian football. The paper applies a multifaceted theoretical background, combining a psychoanalytical view of gender issues with a sociological framework, to data collected through an ethnographic approach employing participant observation and interviews. The research uncovers acts of gender resistance and compliance by Brazilian female football players. Some women use football to resist the hegemonic gender order in the sport; they love the nation’s cultural icon and they will fight for their right to play. Others argue for the importance of complying with a normative femininity in order to be acceptable to sport managers, agents, the press and the general public. Still others refuse a normative femininity and fight for the ‘naturalness’ of women in football. In the face of the hurdles faced by Brazilian women who want to enjoy the major sport in the country, this paper claims that only urgent federal legislation will lead women to gender equality in Brazilian football.

Brazilian women in the sports press: a case study

2011

Knijnik JD, Soares de Souza JS. Brazilian women in the sports press: a case study. The media is a powerful tool in creating sports legends. However, international studies have proved that the media tends to favor male athletes and their feats and neglects female sports players. The main purpose of this paper is to determine how many articles one of the most important daily newspapers in Brazil published about male and female athletes. The data was gathered over a number of months at the beginning of this decade. The analysis demonstrated that men usually are mentioned much more frequently than women, that journalists tend to write more about the appearance of female athletes than about their real talents for sport. The findings lead to the conclusion that gender inequality in sport in Brazil is common and that the media, instead of contributing to the decrease in levels of gender inequality, is contributing to this inequality in wider society.

From the cradle to Athens: The silver-coated story of a warrior in Brazilian soccer

Sporting Traditions, 2011

Games. Biographical methodology is used in this article, which is an oral history of an elite athlete's life using semi-structured interviews to capture her personal reflections. Fighting against gender prejudice, Cabral made the Brazilian national team when she was fifteen years old. Three years later she was a member of the Brazilian team at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Four years after that, at the Athens Olympics, she was captain, leading a team that demonstrated to the world that soccer in Brazil is not only a man's game and that Brazilian women also can play successful football at the international level. Cabral's story, and her personal reflections, reveal the paradoxes in which Brazil's female soccer players are enmeshed: on the one hand, they fight against their subjugation in the field; on the other hand, they display intolerance against non-normative ways of being feminine.

The construction of soccer stories in Brazil (1922 to 2000): some remarks

TEMPO (UFF), 2013

There are few studies on the historiography of Brazilian soccer. This article aimed at performing a necessary critical reflection about some of the most important works of soccer history in Brazil, not only in order to evaluate the state of art production on the theme, but also to stimulate methodological and conceptual reflections. We also sought to perceive how the memory pertaining Brazilian soccer was elaborated by those who wrote its histories.

Between the confrontation and the concession: the identities of Brazilian Olympic female athletes

The aim of this study is to analyze the construction of the Brazilian Olympic athletes’ identity both in the Olympic scenery as in the Brazilian social context, based on the life stories of the protagonists of these events. The history of the relationship between women and sport in Brazil is marked initially by prohibitions and regulations, maintain the subterfuge of maternal attributes and subsequently by an exaltation of the female body in its sensual aspects. Thus, women's sport has continued to be a field of male mediation. Narratives of Olympic athletes, confronted with the theoretical framework of cultural studies, specifically the work of Stuart Hall on the identity in post-modernity, indicate that, despite the growing inclusion of women in various sports, this has not been a rethinking of the social roles of men and women in sport. Draws attention that this inclusion was not as confrontational as in other countries, keeping relations with the Brazilian feminist movement's history. So many athletes have a speech supporting a separation between athlete's life and life as a woman, holding that, although they are athletes, they not ceased to be a woman. The athletes affirm a sense that they are uncomfortable standing on a male-dominated field.

Visions of Gender Justice Untested Feasibility on the Football Fields of Brazil

Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 2013

From 1941 to 1979 women in Brazil were forbidden by law to play the national sport of football and continue to struggle to participate this major aspect of the country's social life. This paper focuses on the political ideas of Juliana Cabral, the captain of the Brazilian women's football team that won the silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004. Against a background of organized political contestation of the gender structure in Brazilian sports,