Narrativas de surfistas brasileiros: notas sobre a emergência do surfe profissional

Abstract

The present thesis was elaborated in the Postgraduate Program in Physical Education of the Federal University of Pelotas, in the line of research “Sociocultural Studies of Sport and Health”. The final products of this thesis are two scientific articles, that dialogue in the process of composition of the object of this research, that is the surfing practiced by Brazilian surfers. Thus, the guiding question of this thesis was: how Brazilian surfers were situated in the process of professionalization and transformation of surfing into a modern sport. The first article, called Heterotopic possibilities of surfing: an analysis of Ricardo dos Santos' speech, had as its main objective the analysis of the speech of the surfer who was murdered in Guarda do Embaú, on January 20th of 2015, based on some Foucaultian concepts, such as speech, event, and heterotopias. The results of this study demonstrated that, even though Ricardinho may belong to a generation of Brazilian surfers who joined the competitive surfing, his engaged discourse emphasized the care with the environment and an appreciation of the playful dimension of surfing, establishing the possibility of this practice constituting itself in a heterotopia. The second article, called Brazilian Surfer Body Techniques: notes on maneuvering performance, had as its main objective to narrate the construction process, genesis, surfing maneuvers, and body techniques of surfers, which helped to sportivize Brazilian surfing, making it more performative. The narratives of four surfers (three men and one woman), who professionalized themselves from the 1990s onwards, show a set of unvestments linked to the modeling of their bodies to an aggressive style of surfing, along the lines of the most popular circuit of their time.