Representação social da mulher brasileira nas atividades físico-desportivas: da segregação à democratização

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe the meaning of social representations associated with Brazilian women in physical-sport activity from 1870, when women tended to be excluded from these activities, to 1 950, when there was a widespread process of democratization of women's access to sports, which culminated in the first Womens Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro. With the support of multiple methodological approaches, the study considers: (a) the testimony of Brazilian intellectuals medical doctors, jurists and educators - involved with the issue of women in sports in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century (Nísia Floresta, João da Matta Machado, Rui Barbosa, Fernando de Azevedo, Orlando Rangel Sobrinho and Afrânio Peixoto); (b) semi-structured interviews with elite informants considered icons of the movement of women's emancipation in/through sports: Maria Lenk, Yara Vaz, Aída dos Santos and Roselee Viana Ribeiro, and (c) media documents, mainly those concerned with the Spring Games, the first Women's Olympic Games, organized by the Jornal dos Sports from 1949 to 1972. The interpretation and analysis of the different materiais is based on the theoretical principies of content and discourse analysis and on some fundamental categories of social representations, especially the formulations of Abric and Sá concerning the nuclear and peripheric systems of representations. Resuits indicate to some expressive changes in the process of women's emancipation in sports associated with the peripheric system. The evidence points to an increasing emancipation in women's sports practice: more mobility in the sports scene, a decrease in the restrictions on women s participation in sports considered to be masculine, a decrease in the control of the family and of the micro-social context over the choice of sports. On the other hand, the nuclear social representations have been more resistant to change, continuing to conceive the sports space as being peculiar to men, who dominate the sports scene in terms of positions, honors, prestige in the media, sponsorship and financial return. We conclude that the process of Brazilian women's emancipation in sport, encouraged by some women-icons, is taking place in a non-confronting manner revealing a non-violent mechanism of space occupation, with efficient strategies in terms of practice, but not as ef f icient in terms of representations. All in ali, we are led to conclude that women athletes still have to put up with the consequences of negative and restrictive evaluations, associated with the change from private space to public space in sports. The study supplies positive evidence for the hypothesis that, although dinamically different, the representations and practices associated with the same symbolic field are reciprocally engendered.