QUEER SPORTS PRACTICES IN THE ANTINOMIES BETWEEN GAME AND ANTI-GAME: ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

• Grant number: 13/00047-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): June 01, 2013
• Effective date (End): May 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Henrique de Toledo
• Grantee: Wagner Xavier de Camargo
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the late twentieth century, the modern sport was shattered into multiple expressions as a result of the claim of "minorities" coming from the decolonization processes. Among such expressions, there are tournaments where 'disabled' athletes compete between themselves (Paralympic Games) and tournaments where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT) compete together (Gay and OutGames). This postdoctoral project takes as a starting point the multi-sited ethnographies of these games and proposes reconsiderations of bodies and practices through what I call queer sports practices. The main scientific challenge is to discuss to what extent such practices are characterized as "anti-game practices", which are established from the negative, disruptive of the normative, and purposeful new dimensions added to the mainstream sports system. The contribution of the research is to problematize the game (as a concept) in order to think anthropologically to what extent the queer sports practices are in the own games inserted/represented. Then, we must determine where such practices are in antinomies between game and anti-games in order to describe the extent to which it enables are other possibilities for sport. Moreover, it opens the opportunity to (re)discuss the sport categories such as sex/gender, efficiency/disability, sexuality/eroticism, and assimilation/subversion.