Football and the ‘new’ gender order: Brazilian cinema in the late twentieth century

Abstract

As an integral part of popular culture, football has been the central theme of countless movies from around the world. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, after enduring 15 years of a bloody dictatorship that had, among other crimes, censored free speech, Brazilian cinema embraced the critique of the social order that was spreading around the country. It produced movies that used football as a plot device to question the conservative representations of gender and sexual relations that belonged to the darkest years of the dictatorship. In this paper, we analyse late twentieth century Brazilian football cinema and reveal how this genre exhibited to the country a new gender order where hegemonic masculinity was criticized on its own terrain: the football field. By using a descriptive analysis, we focus on two movies where the gender order and the sexual affairs of footballers are turned upside down. Finally, we argue that these productions were testimony to a new era not just for Brazilian culture, but for a whole society which was emerging from an era of political, cultural and human obscurity.