“Equilíbrio precário”: corpo, gênero e família em Bragança/Pará (1916-1940)

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how representations, practices and values were woven to the female body in Bragantina society between the years 1916 and 1940. In this sense, the problem was based on the view that the various characters involved in sexual crimes were women who with their experiences posed dangers to the balance of hegemonic family and social relations and Therefore, they should be watched so that they do not use their body as a place of exercise of power. To this end, the analysis started from the cross-study of discourses present in sixty-three judicial cases, nine medical and legal works, the Penal Codes of 1890 and 1940, the Civil Code of 1916, the Code of Postures of Bragança, in addition to the periodicals Cidade de Bragança, O Cidadão and Revista Bragança Ilustrada, which circulated in the proposed period. The sources allowed access to daily life, to loving relationships, to the various values that residents of the Bragantina region and representatives of the legal elaborated on body, sexuality, family, honor, morality, work and leisure, for example. Based on values such as work, family, honor and morality, the investigations showed that the bodies, behaviors, habits, interests and desires of women became the core of the concerns of the state, society and men when the subjects were morality, sexuality and appropriate family constitution. However, despite the surveillance, control and restrictions that women were subjugated in the period studied, many were not willing to conform their bodies, their interests and needs to the moralizing and disciplinary discourses that intended to imprison them.