Body Practices and Body Education: biopolitics in Belém do Pará

Abstract

This article examines how bodily practices – especially gymnastics and sports – were mobilized as devices for educating the body in the city of Belém do Pará between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study investigates how these practices contributed to the production of bodily norms, articulating discipline, health, and morality within a broader context of urban modernization. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework, the research analyzes historical documents (newspapers, magazines, regulations, and manuals), treated as monuments within an archaeogenealogical approach. The findings show that medical-hygienist, pedagogical, scientific, and nationalist discourses sustained a regime of visibility of the schooled body, in which gymnastics and sport operated as technologies of biopower and mechanisms of social regulation. The results indicate that such practices formed a specific pedagogical plot of control-stimulation, marked by disputes, tensions, and contradictions that produced particular modes of subjectivation and normalization of bodies. By highlighting these processes, the study contributes to understanding how bodily practices were employed as strategies of social regulation and as means of shaping bodily models aligned with Belém’s modernizing project.