Physical Education, Femnities and Uniforms. The Case of the Departamento De Cultura Física (1929-1946) of the Universidad Nacional De La Plata (Argentine)

Abstract

We investigate the construction of femininities from the use of uniforms for Physical Education classes. For this, we base ourselves on the case of the Department of Physical Culture, an institution that existed between 1929 and 1946, of the National University of La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina). We wonder about how and why the Physical Education uniforms contributed to gendering and sexualizing the bodies of female students. We build three periods from the mandatory establishment of female uniforms for Gymnastics classes: 1929-1934, 1935-1939, and 1940-1946. This use was due to the decisions made by the authorities of the Colegio Secundario de Señoritas, which also implied different ways of understanding and teaching the subject. From a qualitative methodological strategy, we propose the interpretation of a case, approaching it from the tools coming from the critical perspective of gender and visual history. We use written and visual sources, as well as semi-structured interviews with former students. We consider that the obligatory nature of uniforms, in relation to the construction of femininities, involves moral, aesthetic, sexual, material, erotic, and kinetic dimensions. In this sense, we conclude that what happened with the teaching of Physical Education in the Colegio Secundario de Señoritas, in terms of the transmission of femininities, accounts for a permanent tension in society between equality and inequality between women and men, without not be a linear path at all from inequality to equality or less inequality.