Brodagem, moral e músculo: a malhação de rua em Salvador.

Abstract

This ethnography describes and analyzes relationships between masculinities, urban space, bodies, and morality among young and adult men, residents of a popular neighborhood in the city of Salvador da Bahia (Brazil). The so-called “brothers” regularly gather in a public space to practice “workout” – muscular hypertrophy with the use of improvised and self-made equipments – and “calisthenics” or “street training” – urban exercises based on the recreation of gymnastics movements from olympic training, fitness training, breakdance, and le parkour. Public spaces for physical training become conducive to the emergence of almost exclusively male and heterosexual sociability bonds, hosting modes of socialization through which men learn and incorporate sports techniques to transform their body appearance. Issues of gender, sexuality, social class, and race emerge. The understanding of how bodies are imagined, manufactured, and sexualized in these training spaces are analyzed and described. Based on extensive field work, interviews, the use of photographs and the researcher's practical engagement in bodily activities, this ethnography shows: 1) the demarcation of physical and symbolic boundaries of a training space that is transformed into a territory of intergenerational male sociability; 2) the emphasis given, by the regulars themselves, to young people who transform “workout” and/or “street training” into a lifestyle; 3) transformations in body aesthetics and the creation of bonds with other men (a training brotherhood), as part of adherence to a lifestyle called “fitness”; 4) the emergence of moral conceptions marked by the routine of focused training, dietary discipline, and notions of personal success, social distinction, and prestige; 5) the subject's agency in search of a physical and subjective response to the effects of territorial stigma, violence, racism, and the absence of formal work, which characterize many urban peripheries in Brazil. At the crossroads of these questions, there is the learning of technical skills and a common language regarding forms of “manufacturing” a virile and strong body, incorporated through exercises, but also conversation, observation, physical contact, and the communion with values that – outside the group – could easily be condemned as misogynistic and homophobic.