Educating bodies for the nation: schools, masculinity and transnational knowledge in 19th century Brazil

Abstract

This paper discusses the senses and meanings attributed to physical culture, its conceptions, functions, and role within nineteenth-century Brazil’s educational system. By focusing on diverse kinds of schools as spaces of reference for children and adolescents and the efforts to shape their bodies, this work analyzes the importance of youth for national projects and how educators tried to represent young ideal bodies in school curricula as they made the transition from infancy to adulthood. It also shows how the body is a complex web of ideas and representations, a territory fought over within state institutional spaces. By understanding the “new behaviors” that the modern state wished to promote, the present paper focuses on how physical education shaped health and hygiene conditions through bodily exercises and the pivotal role played by schools within the strategy to transform young students into healthy, strong, disciplined citizens ready to serve the nation.