Do flirt, do footing, da Rua Nova : melindrosas e almofadinhas no Recife da década de 1920

Abstract

This research aims historicize the new ways of sociabilities, practices and resignifications of male and female bodies, on the melindrosa and almofadinha, foregrounded by the twenty’s press of Recife. The period highlighted got known by great modifications concerning the cities. Time of effervescent development of means of transport, enlargement and modernization of urban areas, and the emergence of new spaces of social interaction, places like cinemas, stores, pastries and coffee shops, appear as important places where gradually happens the behavior changes of urban person and, in this meantime, the cities consecrate theirself as main and denser conviviality areas, overcoming the rural environment. By means of magazines and newspapers from that period, based on the Cultural History’s assumptions; and giving relevance to gender studies as a category of historical analysis, we will investigate the characters mentioned, social figures that repeatedly appear represented by the press in a polemic way, because of their distorting behavior. In Recife and elsewhere, the body was going through deep resignifications and alterations on the masculinity and femininity notions. The “To be in fashion” acquired more value and aggregated to it the urban medium-class strata’s social mobility desire. Therefore, the body is observed as the locus of rebellion, as the break of traditionalism, setting it as a new language to the modern and facing old social practices, and a new object of reconfiguration of male and female.