“Men dance like men!”: body performances and gender identity in two evangelical churches in a brazilian capital

Abstract

The present study aims to understand how the identity affirmation of masculinities takes place from the
corporal experience in liturgical dance in two evangelical churches in the city of Teresina-PI, Brazil. For this
purpose, this investigation involved conducting semi-structured interviews as a data collection technique,
which were analyzed using the hermeneutic-dialectic method and problematized in the light of poststructuralist
and cultural gender studies. The results then demonstrated that the construction of masculinities
by the interviewed subjects occurs amid four main factors that are very recurrent in their speeches and that
constitute the themes discussed here, such as generational conflicts, gender patterns in dance, body control
and perceptions of masculinity. It was inferred, therefore, that the question is not even so much that men
dance, but how they dance, in which they are inspected as to the coherence between body condition and
their proper gendered representation of masculinity.