Da moralidade à transgressão: a moda feminina na cidade do Recife entre os anos 1916 a 1920

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how the novelties present in Recife's fashion, between 1916 and 1920, are opposed to the traditional models of gender and pattern of the ideal woman, representing both a break in customs and a tool of female transgression. The choice of the time cut is justified by the novelties presented with the Casa Gondim parade, which took place in 1916, in addition to the changes in fashion in the early post-war years that preceded the so-called "golden years". For this, the methodology was composed by bibliographic research and analysis of primary sources, to identify the elements that contributed to the insertion of new practices in society. Based on this, we investigated how the spatial changes and innovations in socialization practices, as well as their influence on the importation and use of new fashion trends, represented a threat to the model of morality that governed the Recife society in the period, reflecting on the representation of the Northeastern male and the figure of the woman of good family. The theoretical reference presented throughout this work helped us in the analysis of the relationship between fashion and the symbolic construction of gender from a binary perspective. The concepts of habitus, distinction, and field in Pierre Bourdieu, contributed to the understanding of fashion as a cultural practice, perceiving its use as a device of symbolic power, to reaffirm roles and characteristics expected in the relational binary between female and male. The concept of gender developed by Joan Scott allowed us to think of the conception of femininity as a historical category, which varies according to the context and power relations of the period. In this way, the transgressions present in the feminine fashion, in the temporal cut of this research, have outlined new ways of "being a woman", showing that fashion, as a cultural practice, can be used both as a tool for body discipline and as a discourse that denaturalizes the moral and biological ideals attributed to the feminine.