Breaking their way in: women jockeys at the racetrack in Brazil

Abstract

Equestrian sports offer a rare opportunity to bring male and female athletes together as competitors and team members, and women's historic participation in this field has been on the rise worldwide. Nonetheless, as our own previous research on the elite world of show jumping has shown, there are a series of cultural and institutional factors that have operated – within the Brazilian context – to restrict horsewomen's access to the highest international levels and thereby acquire the visibility, success and celebrity status that have been awarded to its most prominent male equestrians. Women's entrance into the still very masculine world of horse racing has proven even more difficult. The work presented here, part of a broader ethnographic study of gender, space and sport at the racetrack, looks at the paths taken by young Brazilian women jockeys – in this case, of predominantly poor and working class origin – in their pioneering incursion into the male preserve of the turf. We focus on questions of subjectivity, construction of identities and negotiation of space, insofar as these processes both reflect and contribute to changing gender relations in contemporary Brazilian society.

Citation

Adelman, M. and Azeredo Moraes, F. (2008), "Breaking their way in: women jockeys at the racetrack in Brazil", Texler Segal, M. and Demos, V. (Ed.) Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 99-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(08)12007-0