"Para fazer pensar e entreter": educação, produção corporal, sujeitos e masculinidades homossexuais na revista Junior (2007-2015)

Abstract

This study analyzed the pedagogies conveyed and disseminated by Junior magazine (2007-2015) to male homosexual subjects. For this purpose, the 66 editions of the magazine that were published during its circulation period in Brazil were used as research source. The central question that organized this thesis was: What are the discourses about homosexual bodies, subjects and masculinities published by Junior magazine? Junior magazine was a journal whose target audience was young, white, middle-class male homosexual subjects from a certain south-central Brazilian region. In its content Junior sought to offer readers articles and reports that invested in body production, especially in an athletic body model, which uses cosmetics and medical procedures in the name of a beauty standard, which is concerned with health and with well being. The magazine also invested in the dissemination of knowledge about homosexualities, leading the reader with concerns that she believed to be of interest to her as the constitution of herself as a male homosexual subject, the relationship with love and the search for affective sexual partners, the emergence of internet and its implication for homosexuality, prevention and living with HIV and the fight against homophobia for rights by homosexual subjects. For this study I was inspired by the poststructuralist perspective that made me think about the ways in which we become subjects, how we are constituted in the midst of the games of truth and, above all, how we relate to the educational processes. Thus, I assumed that cultural artifacts, such as Junior magazine, are educational instances that point to ways of being and being in the world and, moreover, propose ways for subjects to relate to others and to themselves from their own bodies and their experiences. In this sense, Junior invested heavily in the education of its specific audience, disseminating ways of being male and experiencing male homosexuality. With each issue published, the magazine brought readers knowledge about this model of homosexuality and disseminated it through its reports, images and advertisements. Thus, the magazine was establishing throughout its editions the Junior standard of male homosexual subject, the one endowed with athletic body, concerned with medical care and cosmetics, with financial conditions to afford such care and an intense social life marked by presence at parties and nightclubs, as well as an active sex life. This Junior subject pattern has been carried and disseminated throughout the magazine's nearly eight years of circulation, offering readers all this knowledge to achieve such a standard, leading them to produce a body that could also be desired, as well as the bodies of patterned models on the pages of the magazine.