O lazer e a recreação na Revista Brasileira de Educação Física e Desportos como dispositivos educacionais (1968-1984)

Abstract

This paper identifies the prescripts of leisure and recreation during the military period. It departs from the assumption that the concepts of leisure and recreation translated the expectancy of building compliant and disciplined bodies in order to control the population, so that they would be aligned with the military government ideal, thus creating conditions for the nation s safe development. The paper is supported on Michel Foucault s theoretical elaboration, inasmuch as the author states that social control is exerted by means of soft strategies of domination and submission, in which repressive techniques do not prevail in the practice of power, instead, it is based on the dissemination of the discourse concerning an ideal of freedom and autonomy among individuals. Aiming to observe the way these discourses were propagated in the field of Physical Education during the military period, we use as reference material Revista Brasileira de Educação Física e Desportos, issued from 1968 to 1984. This magazine is broadly characterized here by demonstrating its technical and ideological aspects, as well as its prescriptive character concerning leisure and recreation towards the various social actors with the purpose of introducing them in that normalization society model. The paper concludes that leisure and recreation, as bodily practices in the field of Physical Education, were employed as elusive mechanisms for establishing that social order. Hence, it presents another perspective rather than the one defended by the military regime, which, intending to maintain itself, simply used repressive actions. Such perspective considers that there were artifices aimed at spreading the positivist ideal along the society. Therefore, the paper defends the belief that, in order to conduct the population s behavior, leisure and recreation were educational practices applied to the whole social body, both in the formal and in the informal fields.