Ninguém é de ferro: a construção da corporeidade em uma academia de ginástica feminina de um bairro popular em João Pessoa

Abstract

The following research is centered on the construction of the female body in contemporary society, from the development of an ethnographic experience in a women’s fitness gym, located in a popular neighborhood in the city of João Pessoa, during the period from December 2012 to December 2013. The objectives of the study are to investigate how the body is built on the practices and discourses of a women’s fitness center, which control mechanisms, and profiles of femininity constituted in everyday fitness facility. Moreover, it is also a main interest of this study to examine the practices of an organized sociability, as to understand the socio anthropological construction of the body in the context of those health centers. The research involves middle-aged adult women attending a women's fitness club and the results are structured into main axes of analysis, namely: the morality of practices around the body, the represented tangible types and the not stated performance identified by body movements. The study revealed that the corporeality is constituted by a broad network of meanings that involves my own body as revealed the survey. Therefore, the femininity stands out and pervades the maternal, the marital, the media and the religious fields, such as the changes that happen during the middle-aged period; a dynamic of permanent construction between subjects and the social environment.