“A vida em que vivemos”: Race, Gender and Modernity in São Gonçalo

Abstract

In this article the author displays some ethnographic data from a research with young people of both sexes in a big popular periphery neighborhood of São Gonçalo city, Metropolitan Area of Rio de Janeiro. The research main goal is to interrogate the modernization experience in an environment of sub-citizenship and poverty. More specifically the question is how the agents mobilize race/gender practices and representations in that context. The discussion about modernization and race relations as well a brief sociological description of the neighborhood help to better understand the ethnographic observations which are related with the body uses, its racialization and gendering; the class subalternity experience; and the feeling of eccentricity or peripheral condition.