De carne, pedra e desejos: imagens de corpos femininos no cotidiano urbano de Jacobina-BA (década de 1930).

Abstract

In this master dissertation, we question how written newspapers and their advertisements, medical writings, and administrative and law documents constituted mechanisms for creating images of town and female body and behaviors supposed to be proper to Jacobina, during the decade of 1930. Town of progress and civility. Beautiful, productive and healthy bodies. Social female roles limited to marriage and motherhood. That was the town and those were the body standard desired from men; especially those who developed activities in relation to the letters, commerce, law and medicine. Then, it was observed the existence of a complex, discursive institutional network that aimed to rule the town and its citizens. However, in daily life contact, in the experienced town, a variety of practices and usages emerged that contrasted with the desired urban order, the body pattern and the female behaviors. By this, we understood the town as a field of asymmetric power relations, and as a place of usages (CERTEAU, 2012). We employ theories by Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau to explain the body as a surface in which the cultural rules are made present. A scrutinized body. A body molded by culture. An alive body. A heterogeneous body. A body disciplined daily. We used as research sources to write this historical narrative texts from newspaper O Lidador, The Code of Conduct and some photographs from the decades of 1930b. Between the textual genres found in newspaper O Lidador, we focused on the commercial advertisements of magazines, medicines, beauty products, clothes and women’s accessories shops, also advertisements of dentistry services of and medico-surgical procedures. In adopting these texts as historical research sources, we understood that their temporality and social structure had an active role into the molding of daily life behaviors, and concepts of body and town.