Power, Bodies and Representations of Manhood among Police Officers and Rugby Players

Abstract

In these work, we reflect about body representations and notions of masculinity through a comparative dialogue between different research subjects and objects. We compare the results of two ethnographic works: the first one is about men who play rugby in the city of La Plata, and the other is about police men and women of the province of Buenos Aires. Our objective /goal is to analyse how agents who belong to different social worlds produce and reproduce, through their bodies, notions of gender. Our analysis focuses first on the body representations in each of these two worlds to analyse, then, how these representations are used. We are concerned with the ways in which the body becomes a referent to notions of masculinity and how these are eventually used as resources according to different social contexts