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This paper intends to show the metonymical identification that exists between the male body and the Basque community and how this identification provokes a systematic exclusion of women from the spaces where cultural protagonism is displayed. To do so, it will examine how protagonism is performed in the sport of hand pelota, a sport in which the most popular modality is exclusively male and which has been central to shaping the Basque imaginary. The game of pelota has shaped many of the main squares in Basque villages and towns, as well as the Basque bodies placed in them. The place where pelota is played, the fronton, is the space used by the Basque community to hold their most significant events. And Pelota is the prototypical game played in that space. By deciphering the chain of signifiers generates in the game, it is possible to understand the imaginary which prevent women from becoming protagonists in the context of Basque cultural representation. The paper tells the story of one of them, the Navarrese pelota player Maite Ruiz de Larramendi, forced to give up pelota when she was a child, and attempts to provide keys for the interpretation of other cases beyond its ethnographic boundaries, such as the well-known case of the South African athlete Caster Semenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes those gender aspects that made a difference between the repression of women and men during the early years of Franco's dictatorship. The analysis is presented from both, gender studies and political anthropology. This way these aspects will be linked up with the inherited political traditions during the Franco regime. The paper propose an explanation about the way in which the separation of women from the domestic domain, and their entrance in the political space as public subjects that occurred in Spain during the second Republic and the Civil War; was a hidden fact, covered up by the governmental repressive politics. This was an elaborated discourse of the historical narrative that the political role of women was reshaped and reconstructed as collectively inexistent. It was turn into a distortion, as a set of particular cases of delinquency and deviation. The construction of this discourse was based from the beginning on the establishment of certain practices such as the logic of the system of justice, as it will be demonstrated in the analysis of the trial reports of women. It is by the analysis of this file reports, understood as cultural creations, where there may be distinguished the system of a symbolic construction not capable consider women as a political subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analysis based on the ethnography in sex clubs and sex bars for men in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The paper examines how the different markers that operate in such areas are being melted to produce desirable bodies and subjects. I locate these sites in the broader market for commercial sexual encounters among men in the city, exploring social conventions and practices that permeate the body, sexual practices and erotic choices. This is a starting point for inquiring the ways in which certain stereotypes of "masculinity" are provided with meaning and are embodied. I also propose a revision of the erotic choices and sexual practices, which challenges the idea of eroticism expressed by thinkers such as Georges Bataille. According to him, gender is fixed and crystallized, is linked to sexual dimorphism of sex/gender positions. The body "violated", passive and penetrated, is "feminine"- the opposite of the "masculine" ones, the "active", that penetrates. This design underlines the erotic within the heterosexual matrix, which prevents thinking beyond or outside the limits of its rules. Following post-structuralist thinking on gender and sexuality, as well as queer theory, I wonder if we could try to deconstruct the erotic in other terms, in order to interpret anthropologically the practices, discourses and talks discussed here as potentially transgressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a case study to analyze the means by which a processional ritual reinforces the tenets of a dominant model of motherhood. It explains how the process of motherhood, including pregnancy, childbirth and nurturing has been a core element in the creation of feminine knowledge. This knowledge has been strategically expanded to other domains of women's lives, such as social networks of solidarity, help or exchange of knowledge and experiences. The naturalization process, the concept of motherhood as feminine essence, and the creation of homogeneous and identical groups are reinforced and legitimized by a set of rituals and icons. In this paper I argue that the institutions that have invented or maintained these rituals have created an illusion of equality between men and women, therefore invisibilizing gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]