Abstract:

This research analyzes eugenic discourses about corporal education in Argentina and Brazil between 1920 and 1940. With a historical-hermeneutic methodology, it is studied meanings published in pedagogical “official” journals of these countries, focusing in the Revista de Educación (Buenos Aires province) and Revista do Ensino (Minas Gerais estate). This investigation bases on the hypothesis that on both sides of the Argentine-Brazilian border there were public policies on bodies, which show particularities and recurrences in the uses of eugenic senses as legitimate rhetoric. In order to resignify the place of the body as an object of public policies, this research allows us to question the uses of physical culture as a mechanism to transmit a moral hygiene and the axiom that perform it as a vehicle to improve the race and progress of the country.

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