School physical education in formation of identities of women practicing collective sports

Abstract

The article relates gender identity and sport and contextualizes narratives of women engaged in sports of male tradition and predominance, from the memory of their sporting trajectories in childhood, in school physical education and in the alterities experienced in practice of sports in adulthood. The study is configured, from the methodological point of view, as participant observation carried out with young women practicing collective confrontation sports in a public leisure center in the suburb of Rio de Janeiro. The results describe the processes of insertion, confrontation, identification and permanence of these women in certain sports, in the place studied, as a space of male leisure and predominance, and the relation between these processes with childhood memory and school physical education.  As a conclusion, it presents the importance of school physical education to build strategies and identity narratives which support the permanence of these women in sports modalities established as male space.