Archambault, J. S. (2024) Corps déplacés: le fitness et la visibilité des femmes au Mozambique, Anthropologie et Sociétés, 48:2.

Abstract:

The growing popularity of fitness across urban Mozambique, an activity that many carry out outdoors, highlights some of the challenges women face in their everyday lives, particularly regarding competing efforts to control their movements and visibility in public spaces. In this paper, I focus on the circulation of a series of images, on social media, depicting the activities of a community fitness organization, highlighting the unexpected and transformative repercussions this had on how the women see themselves and are seen by the rest of the community. Locating the event within local politics of visibility and invisibility, I reflect on how images participate in the construction of a public to qualify understandings of the transformative potential of sport. The paper is based on ethnographic research that I have carried out with the organization in the Mozambican city of Inhambane over a five-year period.

Link : https://doi.org/10.7202/1114864ar