TRAINING OF WOMEN ATHLETES: AN INSTAGRAM ANALYSIS OF PLAYERS FROM THE BRAZILIAN WOMEN’S NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM IN TIMES OF PANDEMIC

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the ways athletes from Brazilian Women’s National Football Team narrate their training sessions on Instagram during the period of social distancing imposed by COVID-19. Photographs, videos, and texts posted in profiles of 18 athletes were captured from March to July 2020. Based on Instagram posts, we verified that this production of self-narratives is based on the agency of numerous elements that associate and become part of the training scenarios. In addition, the analysis showed that it is through inventiveness and the circulation of knowledge that athletes lead and enable, even if remotely, the training essential to the role of professional players.

Keywords:
Women; Football; Social networks; Pandemic

Resumo

O presente estudo buscou analisar os modos como as atletas da seleção brasileira de futebol narram suas sessões de treinamento no Instagram em meio ao período de distanciamento social imposto pela Covid-19. As fotografias, os vídeos e textos exibidos nos perfis de 18 atletas foram capturados nos meses de março a julho de 2020. Com base nas postagens do Instagram, verificamos que essa produção de narrativas de si ocorre a partir da agência de inúmeros elementos que se associam e passam a compor os cenários dos treinamentos. Além disso, a análise mostrou que é por meio da inventividade e da circulação de saberes que as atletas protagonizam e viabilizam, mesmo que de forma remota, os treinamentos essenciais à função de jogadoras profissionais.

Palavras chave:
Mulheres; Futebol; Redes sociais; Pandemia

Resumen

El presente estudio buscó analizar cómo las atletas de la selección brasileña de fútbol narran sus sesiones de entrenamiento en el Instagram en el período de distancia social impuesto por la Covid-19. Las fotos, los videos y los textos exhibidos en los perfiles de 18 atletas fueron capturados en los meses de marzo a julio de 2020. Con base en las publicaciones del Instagram, constatamos que esa producción de narrativas de sí mismas ocurre a partir de la agencia de numerosos elementos que se asocian y pasan a componer los escenarios de los entrenamientos. Además, el análisis ha mostrado que es a través de la inventiva y de la circulación de saberes que las atletas protagonizan y viabilizan, aunque sea de manera remota, los entrenamientos esenciales a su rol de jugadoras profesionales.

Palabras clave:
Mujeres; Fútbol; Redes sociales; Pandemia

1 INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS

The use of social networks to connect people and share images is an important contemporary phenomenon. Using different devices is no longer just a choice, but an imperative of modern life. WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, among others, are platforms that receive posts from people from different continents, generating a gigantic volume of engagement. About 3.6 billion people used social media to share images in July 2020 - over one billion on Instagram alone (CLEMENT, 2020a). The use of social networks was boosted by the implementation of public policies of social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic (XAVIER et al., 2020). The list of top countries with the most Instagram users is occupied by the USA, followed by India, and Brazil. In October 2020, at the height of the pandemic in Brazil, 95 million Brazilians used the application (CLEMENT, 2020b) to quickly share, through photographs and videos, experiences, facts, beliefs, and convictions with their followers (INSTAGRAM, 2020). This peculiarity, associated with the portability of smartphones, produced rapid growth in the use of the platform (SHELDON; BRYANT, 2016).

Considering the effect of Instagram on contemporary society, this social network has been configured as an interesting locus of investigation capable of producing and circulating a set of meanings to social phenomena. Adopted by most of the athletes of the Brazil Women’s National Football Team, Instagram allows following the training routine of these women and the details of their private lives. By privileging images to the detriment of other modes of communication, Instagram allows its users to interact more and more with multiple visual experiences, materializing the ocularcentric characteristic of postmodern society (MIRZOEFF, 2003). The images shared by the athletes in the application offer us a visual version of their worlds. However, this “translation, even through photography, is never innocent. These images are never transparent windows to the world. They […] present the world in very particular ways” (ROSE, 2001, p. 6).

Taking Instagram as a locus of production of empirical material for cultural analysis requires investments to try to characterize some of its particularities, which suggest the production of “reality” and coherence effects on the lives of those who manifest through the posts. In this sense, due to the risk of us being enmeshed by the effects of the “Theaters of Memory,”¹ we take the assumptions of Le Goff (2013) on the “Documents as a monument,” Gomes (2004) on personal collections, and Larrosa (2004) on narratives to constitute, from this articulation, a set of theoretical and methodological problematizations capable of warning our analytical processes. Constituted as a public space for sharing different dimensions of users’ lives, Instagram can be understood as a way of narrating oneself through carefully thought out and chosen posts/ “monuments,” whose set enables the materialization of a “plot” of senses through a type of personal collection.²

The athletes, by posting daily events in the middle of a pandemic on Instagram, operate a “production of themselves,” or a “biographical act,” understood as an attempt to give special meanings to the world around them, relating them to experiences of their own lives. The “danger” of “biographical acts” lies in the “truth effects”³ that the links of these traces can generate (GOMES, 2004). The organization of the posts, the preparation for/of the photos, the chronology of publications, and mainly the selection of what should or should not appear, reveal a set of political, ethical, and aesthetic intentions that concretize narratives about what it means to be a female professional athlete of the Brazilian National Team.

In the wake of these ideas, we endeavored to analyze the ways the athletes from the Brazil Women’s National Football Team narrate their training sessions on Instagram amid the period of social distancing imposed by COVID-19. In this process, we took the concept of agency (LATOUR, 2012) as a tool capable of identifying and describing the capacity that different elements must produce and modify the training conditions of these women, responding to demands, techniques, aesthetics, and policies that involve exercising the role of professional football athletes. It is important to note that having an ‘agency’ or not is not an attribute of the element itself, but of the links/associations it establishes. In this sense, the narratives materialized on Instagram by the athletes bring, in addition to them, a series of elements that make up the scenarios present in the photos and videos and which, according to their ability to act in the face of training, were also analyzed by us, as following described.

2 METHODOLOGICAL PATH

Visual analyses can be produced from two perspectives: researchers create the images to be analyzed or analyze images generated by other people (BANKS, 2009). In this research, we focus on the images⁴ produced by football players and shared on Instagram.

The research sources were produced between March and July 2020 from public profiles of female Brazilian football athletes. Firstly, we started from the list of players summoned in February 2020, whose name was on the document published on the website of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF).⁵ We established the following inclusion criteria: having an open profile on Instagram and making posts related to the focus of the research, that is, modes of training in the period of greatest travel restrictions and social contact due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We excluded athletes who had only a private profile or who did not post during the research. Finally, the sample was intentional (YIN, 2016) and we have the participation of 18 football players, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1
Number of posts per athlete.

ATHLETE NAME		NUMBER OF POSTS / MONTHS
1	Aline	25 / MARCH (14) and APRIL (11)
2	Aline Milene	01 / MARCH (01)
3	Andressa Alves	17 / MARCH (03), APRIL (04), MAY (03), JUNE (06), and JULY (01)
4	Bárbara	01 / MARCH (01)
5	Bruna Benites	07 / APRIL (05) and JULY (02)
6	Cristiane	19 / MARCH (11), APRIL (06), and MAY (02)
7	Debinha	01 / APRIL (01)
8	Duda	04 / APRIL (02) and MAY (02)
9	Erika	12 / MARCH (02), APRIL (06), MAY (03), and JUNE (01)
10	Formiga	05 / MARCH (03), JUNE (01), and JULY (01)
11	Geyse	03 / MAY (02) and JULY (01)
12	Letícia Santos	01 / JUNE (01)
13	Ludmila	05 / MARCH (01), APRIL (03), and JUNE (01)
14	Marta	06 / MARCH (04), APRIL (01), and MAY (01)
15	Tamires	04 / MARCH (02), APRIL (01), and JUNE (01)
16	Tayla	10 / APRIL (03), MAY (02), JUNE (02), and JULY (03)
17	Thaisa	01 / MARCH (01)
18	Thaisinha	03 / APRIL (01) and MAY (02)
TOTAL		125 / MARCH (43), APRIL (44), MAY (17), JUNE (13), and JULY (08)

• Source: The authors.

Images and texts shared by the athletes were acquired using a computer, and posts that did not meet the object of the investigation were discarded. The capture of new images was interrupted when the athletes returned to training in their respective clubs after the end of social distancing but observing the safety rules. The analyses of the empirical material were produced based on Yin (2016), whose theorization states that there is no universal way to analyze qualitative data nor a fixed or rooted methodology. This analysis proposition goes through five nonlinear phases named: compilation, decomposition, recomposition, interpretation, and conclusion.

In the analysis operationalization, the first phase is materialized in the compilation of the produced material, characterized by the organization of the images and standardization of its size and the upload of the material in software, leaving it ready for reading and the decomposition that characterize the second phase. At that time, the software was an essential tool, as it streamlined the composition of categories, which were fed by the images or their selected clippings from the empirical material. Having exhausted this process of analyzing images and texts, it is recommended to recompose the material, as some excerpts can be grouped into other codes, producing new combinations and categories. We started the fourth phase after an exhaustive analysis of the material, being characterized by the interpretation of results, which take shape in the construction of a new narrative about the theme under study when the categories are compared with other studies on the same subject. Finally, we reached the last phase, that is, the conclusion stage, in which statements are produced in dialogue with the previous phase and, from its, with the others. Yin (2016, p. 160) draws attention to the fact that these phases do not follow a linear path, as their relations are “recursive and iterative.” The analysis process is traversed by the researcher’s attentive listening to everyday experiences, which can point to different paths in their connection with the phases of the process.

3 BEING A WOMAN FOOTBALL ATHLETE AND THE CROSSINGS OF A HISTORY OF INTERDICTION AND INVISIBILITY

On February 18, 2020, the Brazilian Football Confederation published the list of athletes called to participate in the Four Nations Tournament, based in France. The competition, which took place in March 2020, brought together twenty-four athletes belonging to different clubs in Brazil and abroad and ended up becoming one of the few national team competitions this year. However, despite the Covid-19 pandemic having suspended the games and training schedule of these and other athletes around the world, 2020 seems to have been especially productive for those involved with women’s football in Brazil.

At the beginning of September, the Brazilian Football Confederation announced the matching of awards for men and women athletes of the National Team, in addition to appointing Duda Luizelli and Aline Pelegrino, former football players, as new coordinators of the entity’s Women’s Football. These achievements were due to the historical demands of athletes and activists for women’s rights in football.⁶

Significant advances for women’s football in Brazil were noticed from the mid-2010s with the creation of women’s teams by the major Brazilian football clubs, which should not be understood as a result of initiatives by sports entities and managers linked to football in Brazil. These achievements are related to the introduction of gender equality in FIFA’s statute in 2016 and the active and organized movement of women linked to the cause of football, which, day after day, has been pushed CBF and big clubs (ALMEIDA, 2019).

On the one hand, the advances in the sport indicate other possibilities/opportunities for the athletes in the national team, on the other hand, the effects of interdictions and invisibility seem to continue to mark the material conditions of those linked to Football, a recent history whose ballasts continue to constitute representations and identities associated to female football athletes.

In 1988, CBF announced the first call of the Brazil Women’s National Football Team. Nine years after the repeal of the Law that prohibited girls and women from participating in sports “incompatible with the conditions of their nature” (BRASIL, 1941)⁷, awards and remuneration for image rights seemed to be unthinkable issues. In that context, a team formed by women competing for a limited national competition schedule would receive, on loan, uniforms made for the male football teams, an indication that the sport did not belong to them and the organization of a women’s national team by CBF should be considered a concession (GOELLNER, 2019).

Despite the expressive results presented by the Women’s National Team between 1988 and 2020,⁸ the little evidence of their achievements suggests that the discriminatory barriers experienced by these women are related to gender and not sporting disability (SILVA; NAZARIO, 2018). Other arbitrariness can be cited, such as that of the São Paulo Football Federation, which established some aesthetic conditions⁹ for the athletes disputing the “Paulistana” of 2001 to guarantee, through the players’ beauty and femininity, the sporting spectacle (GOELLNER, 2005; KNJINIK ; VASCONCELOS, 2003).

Moreover, command spaces, such as management, technical commission, and refereeing, are still marked by gender asymmetries that tend to hinder and exclude the presence of women in these positions. Passero et al (2020) analyzed the Brazilian Women’s Football Championships (2013-2019) and estimated that proportional equality in the occupation of women in technical commissions would only be possible from 2040 onwards if there is no change in the progressive and slow insertion of women in these command positions.

In this field of disputes, women who dare to remain in football seem to associate different elements and skills that are beyond sporting technique and tactics to position themselves as women and subject who act in the intricacies of power exercises triggered and supported by gender norms. The history of obstacles to the insertion and permanence of women in football seems to constitute experiences shared by a good part of the athletes of the national team here under analysis, an element that seems to have an agency on how they show commitment, discipline, and inventiveness in their training. The athletes, by breaking the conventional established for the time and place of training, compose scenarios for their photos and posts, understood as tactical and strategic arrangements, triggered by them in response to the power mechanisms that tend to say that football is not for them.¹⁰

4 SCENARIO COMPOSITION: BETWEEN DISPLACEMENTS, BLURRINGS, AND BORDER SUSPENSION IN PANDEMIC TIMES

Given the historical context that women’s football has gone through and the changes that it has been conquering, even if still tiny, towards the leading role and the equality of conditions relative to men’s football, the sports universe has changed drastically and rapidly on March 11, 2020, when Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), announced that COVID-19 is characterized as a pandemic. Regional, national, and international championships were paralyzed, postponed, and even suspended. The Olympic and Paralympic Games, the sporting event with the greatest worldwide repercussion (MEZZAROBA; PIRES, 2011), scheduled for 2020 in the city of Tokyo, was transferred to July 2021. These changes were in line with the proposition of social distancing adopted as an attempt to contain the pandemic agreed by WHO.

Clubs and training venues were temporarily closed, but it did not mean that athletes would stop training. In directing our gaze towards the athletes of the Brazil Women’s National Football Team, we identified, in their narratives on Instagram, that their training processes in the initial period of the pandemic (period with the greatest restriction of personal contact) continued. In this sense, the question that became interesting to ask is: How did they continue the training?

In the posts on Instagram, the athletes gave visibility to a set of actions that offer some ‘clues’ to answer this question, which, in turn, were only possible to happen from places, materials, people, times, and knowledge that make up their daily lives affected by the pandemic. Thus, before we focus on addressing how they continued training, we undertook analytical efforts to discover these ‘scenarios’ that co-produced these training modes and the way they were given visibility in athletes’ posts.

The first element to be addressed is the place where the training started to be carried out. The house, apartment, garage, patio, and sports spaces of the condominiums they live in were daily becoming visible in the athletes’ posts, moving from spaces that belonged to their private sphere of life to a public sphere. Similarly, streets, fields, and plazas of their neighborhoods were occupied by these players and their training materials, reducing the impersonality of these public spaces, and becoming part of their daily lives. This replacement could be observed in 11 athlete profiles among the 18 athletes with analyzed posts, such as Aline Reis (@linereisfutbol) (A), Andressa Alves (@andressaalves9oficial) (B), Erika (@erikotinhac) (C), and Thaisinha (@thaisinhaduarte) (D). (Figure 1)

Figure 1
Training of athletes Aline Reis, Andressa Alves, Erika, and Thaisinha Duarte.

Goalkeeper Aline Reis (@alinereisfutbol), Tenerife’ athlete in Spain, announced on March 13, 2020, just two days after the last game for the Brazilian team, what would become a common practice among women athletes of the team: training wherever possible, away from teammates and professionals who guide and govern training. In one of her posts, the national team’s goalkeeper seems to adapt her training to the conditions imposed for that moment, as she is facing the sea, on an apparently little frequented beach, doing strength training. From that date, Aline also made a series of posts in which her apartment became the main locus for her training. According to post (A), of March 22, 2020, her room was organized to allow the placement of a mattress so she would be able to perform defensive movements with a fall.

Andressa Alves (@andressaalves9oficial) posted images of her training sessions always in open spaces. In the post (B) of April 8, 2020, the street got cones and a ball for her to perform dribbling. The garage was the place chosen by Erika (@erikotinhac) for many posts of her training, according to post (C) of March 31, 2020, in which she lay down and performed exercises for the upper extremities using a bar and gallons as weights. Thaisinha (@thaisinhaduarte) made only three posts over the entire period we analyzed. In the post of May 22, 2020, the place she chose to train was the sports court of her condo.

In addition to Aline Reis, Andressa Alves, Erika, and Thaisinha, Cristiane Rozeira (@crisrozeira), one of the most outstanding athletes in the team started¹¹ to present a set of images and videos of her training. Moved from Santos Futebol Clube’s premises, the training sessions are held in what appears to be the garage of her house, a rethought space to respond to the impositions of social distancing.

Given this diversity of locations, the athletes’ posts show some recurring elements, sometimes in the images, sometimes in the captions, or even in the various hashtags (#). The use of sporting and adapted materials, display of brands and sponsors, the help of people, including those who cohabit and are partners, and expressed feelings compose the scenarios of the photos and videos posted by the athletes, co-producing the narratives that are built. These elements, when requested and brought into relation, blur, and even put in suspension the borders that define them. When moving training to the home, it seems that it is no longer possible to understand it as the place of the private. Home becomes public after the exhibition of certain parts that compose it. Concomitantly, public spaces such as the street, the field, and the neighborhood plaza assume characteristics of particular use in which it is possible to customize them with sporting materials, especially the ball. Thus, these Instagram narratives allow identifying that these spaces, hybrid between public and private, take on an agency given the athletes’ actions and their training.

The institutionalization of time also takes on new shapes. Without a timetable for returning to the official games, the athletes compose in their narratives a time in which physical, technical, and tactical training, required by their professions, is also a leisure time in which games, amusements, and laughter gain prominence; time to give visibility to sponsors; time to manage the publicization and detailing of some facts of their lives; time to express the love for football; time to do other bodily practices; and time to show and publicize the support for the campaign against COVID-19, according to the following post, (Figure 2) which was observed on the Instagram of athletes Tamires (@tata_dias10) and Aline Milene (@ amilene77) (E):

Figure 2
Disclosure of support to combat COVID-19.

These narrated times, as well as spaces, provoke us to think “in favor of the pleasure of confusing borders, as well as in favor of responsibility in their construction” (HARAWAY, 2009, p. 37), a construction that takes place in the historical specificities of these women’s football athletes. We could rehearse that they are “cyborgs” narratives, a term brought up by Donna Haraway when writing the Cyborg Manifesto and that opens up the co-production of our lives and the agency of the numerous elements that compose it. The athletes associate elements that “outline plots of science, politics, economics, law, religion, technique, fiction” (LATOUR, 2011, p. 8) when narrating themselves through posts of their training. The composition of these scenarios, produced in times of pandemic, shows us the fragility of considering the dichotomies nature and culture, subject and society, public and private, and leisure and work, to understand the analyzed narratives. At the same time, it shows us the potential to consider that “We are hybrids,” as Bruno Latour (2011, p. 9) makes us reflect, made up of diverse and dynamic associations.

5 TRAINING IN PANDEMIC TIMES: KNOWLEDGE ACTIVATED AND PRODUCED IN THE WORK OF WOMEN ATHLETES

A set of equipment is produced and adapted to continue the training routine and the production of their bodies, composing elements and scenarios in which the athletes of the Brazil Women’s National Football Team make their posts on Instagram. In addition to goalkeeper Aline, defender Erika, and forward Cristiane, previously mentioned, Formiga (@oficial_formiga), Tayla (@tayla.92), Marta (@martavsilva10), and Duda (@maria_eduarda.f), among others, put in evidence, through the postings, a certain inventiveness and ability to adapt themselves, the training, and equipment as a more or less common skill and that informs about the commitment associated with the condition of woman football athletes.

On March 30th and 31st, Aline Reis posted two videos where she trains putting the ball back into play, a very demanding movement from goalkeepers, which consists of throwing the ball with one hand and striking it with the foot. During a football match, the action of putting the ball back into play shows power and precision to make it travel long distances, as well as positioning it assertively in specific regions of the field. As a strategy to carry out the training in a visibly small apartment, Aline makes use of what appears to be the same double mattress in Figure 3 but resting on the wall to cushion the ball bounce. With some “X” marks that indicate where the ball should be directed, the mattress is an interesting instrument that allows the use of strength and range of motion in a restricted space.

Figure 3
Training of ball replacement into play.

Forward Cristiane makes use of a training disc fixed to the ceiling of the place where she trains for the training exercises for heading. Functioning as a reference point for executing the movement and stimulating higher jumps, the 19-cm diameter disc had its use adapted to meet specific demands of movements and fundamentals that its position requires (Figure 4).

Figure 4
Training exercise for heading.

The posts that produce narratives of women athletes during the training allowed noticing that those summoned for the Team trigger a set of knowledge and adapt them in very peculiar conditions of their professional practice. In conditions of restricted work, the athletes (re) build and update knowledge that constitutes them as such, a movement that shows the lived experience and the appropriate knowledge in their professionalization processes.¹²

Understood as a set of knowledge, skills, and competences, the knowledge put into operation by the athletes is not limited to that of body practices - “technical, tactical, and aesthetic knowledge expressed by knowing how to do” (LAZZAROTTI FILHO, SILVA, and PIRES, 2013, p. 702), but relate to a set of knowledge about football coming from different fields, such as physiology, biomechanics, and nutrition, which accommodate the body perceptions about the execution and performance that each athlete has of her performance.¹³

Thus, the knowledge that these women activate is related to the lived experience, the understanding of the body response from exercise, the rest, and feeding routine. They are knowledge inscribed in the bodies and in the lived history of these women, mobilized and put into operations. This process can be taken as a type of knowledge that is built on direct work experience, whose demands are configured as stimuli to activate and put into operation different principles, combining limits and possibilities in a type of inventiveness that only becomes possible through the mastery of professional practice (TARDIF and RAYMOND, 2000; SILVEIRA, 2019).

Thus, the defender Erika uses what appears to be a garage as space where she produces and distributes equipment for strength training. Erika performs a sequence of exercises that stimulate different muscle groups using fabric bags, bottles, and plastic bags filled with heavy materials. In another post, amid the training routine and the demands of the body, Erika builds an extensor bench from a set of alternative materials.

Figure 5
Training with an extensor bench.

The Corinthians’ athlete uses an elastic band in a chair resting on an armchair as an instrument to resist the quadriceps contraction movement. In association with exercise, she adopts a sphygmomanometer¹⁴ to partially obstruct blood flow and, thereby, potentiate the process of muscle hypertrophy.¹⁵ (Figure 5)

Once mobilized and put into operation to respond to training demands in times of pandemic, this knowledge, made public on Instagram, is disseminated and put into circulation through the social network. Thus, on March 26, through a 28-second video, midfielder Andressa (andressaalves9oficial) joins a campaign sponsored by Nike that encourages people to practice exercises at home. Similarly, Erica produces a video of 4 minutes and 31 seconds on April 2, indicating the sequence of exercises and patterns of movement execution. On April 13, Aline Reis gives some ideas for goalkeepers who need to train the specificity of their functions in adapted spaces.

Among knowledge triggered, built, and disseminated by Instagram amidst the scenarios that make up their posts on the social network, the athletes produce themselves through these narratives, which, in addition to telling a history of the training in a pandemic moment, give them a certain direction and coherence (LARROSA, 2004). Football emerges in these narratives as a constituent element of these women who, while dedicating themselves to physical training, express their longing for the ball and the game with their teammates. Phrases and hashtags such as “I miss you so much” #primeirotreino (@oficial_formiga, June 29, 2020), “Get out, corona. Please” #SaudadesDoMeuSantosFc (@tayla.92, April 28, 2020), “So happy to be back training, safely of course!” (@martavsilva10, May 11, 2020), and “I miss asking my friend to stop complaining” (@crisrozeira, May 18, 2020) are recurring in the athletes’ posts.

The posts on Instagram show that football is beyond being a corporal practice that they dominate and appreciate, as it constitutes an element whose appropriation and accumulation of knowledge transcend towards the construction of their identities (PINTO and VAZ, 2009), constituting what Tardiff and Raymond named “knowing-being” (2000). Football becomes a constituent of who they are, the axis from which these women build support networks to exercise their function of athletes, as it is possible to see in the (re) organization of their homes, the regulation of their routines, and the production of bodies. In this process, the family, partners, and former street football colleagues are mobilized along with sponsors and supporters in general, a competence built by these women and which can also be understood as elements that have agency in their narratives. In this scenario built by the athletes summoned for the national team, the meanings attributed to sweat, muscle fatigue, and physical tiredness become a reward as the materialization of the work done.

In a process that produces narratives of the training and themselves as football players, Instagram posts teach about exercises and training, evidence a set of knowledge triggered and put into execution to guarantee, even remotely, the exercise of the function of professional players. The set of posts from the athletes summoned for the team showed their knowledge mobilized and adapted in daily practice as a resource capable of solving the problems of the athletes in exercise, giving meaning to their work situations. Among images, videos, and texts that talk about the training routine under a condition of suspension from the “normality” of life, the women of the national team show how to be and behave like professional athletes, show how much the ball, the game, and teammates are part of whom they have become.

6 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The posts of the athletes from the national football team on Instagram showed a daily life crossed by social isolation, producing narratives marked by the agency of a set of elements that produced and changed the training conditions of these women. The uncertainties of a pandemic time seem to have put into action both the need for self-care, understood as social distancing, and the imperative of the trained body, since the return to games was a pressing possibility.

Throughout this investigation, we were able to learn that the training sessions produced and shared by these athletes evidenced the blurring of boundaries between public and private life and new contours in the institutionalization of time, phenomena that, although already being announced by authors as Latour (2011), are particularly important due to COVID-19 and the demands of physical, technical, aesthetic, and political conditions of female athletes. In this process, they call on family members, friends, partners, and wives to assist in their training sessions whose feasibility was due to the ability to activate and put into operation a set of knowledge forged in their professional pathways. They gave sponsors visibility, produced the management of their bodies, used inventiveness, attributed new meanings to old objects, transformed their houses, apartments, condos, patios, and streets into training centers where they tested possibilities and circulated knowledge produced and reaffirmed in their professional routine.

On the one hand, the COVID-19 pandemic suspended or changed work activities on all continents, but on the other hand, the idea that even in the produced disorder the athletes summoned by the Brazil Women’s National Football Team needed to train as a condition to reassert themselves in football, a space conquered by political struggles and the performance of their bodies, was reverberated on their Instagram. The ‘biographical acts’ produced by them during their training allowed us to reflect on the aesthetic, ethical, and political acts that make up women’s football. This undertaking leads us to think that they have built and are building daily ‘acts of visibility’ for a football that at other times were invisible in the so-called ‘country of football.’

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• FUNDING

  This work received financial support from the da Secretaria Nacional de Futebol e Defesa dos Direitos do Torcedor.

• 1
  The idea of “Theater of Memory” helps to shift the focus from what would be the “reality” of these athletes to the senses produced and put into circulation by a group of professional football women about their lives.
• 2
  The narrative itself can be produced either from a series of videos or images or from the effect of a single photograph (ROMNEY; JOHNSON, 2018).
• 3
  It refers to a set of mechanisms that, linked to the knowledge-power relationships, can produce an understanding of what is true in a certain context. What is at stake in the effects of truth is its effectiveness in mobilizing discursive and non-disruptive practices that produce what a given society assumes and makes to be seen as true (SILVA, 2000).
• 4
  It is important to highlight that to capture images from public Instagram profiles, we resort to Law No. 9,610 of 1998, which provides for Copyright (BRASIL, 1998), the text of which explains that information packed in public spaces can be freely used. At the same time, we rely on Resolution 510 of 2016 of the National Health Council (BRASIL, 2016), which states that investigations that use access and public domain information are exempt from the Research Ethics Committee and the National Research Ethics Committee.
• 5
  Official list of the call carried out by the coach Pia Sundhage on February 18, 2020. Available at https://www.cbf.com.br/selecao-brasileira/noticias/selecao-feminina/pia-sundhage-convoca-selecao-feminina-para-disputa-do-torneio-franca. Accessed on October 5, 2020. On September 2, 2020, there was a new call carried out by the coach of the Brazil National Women’s Football Team, calling for training only athletes who are playing in Brazilian teams. However, we do not use this listing for this study.
• 6
  Available at https://www.ludopedio.com.br/arquibancada/nos-convidamos-a-cbf-a-trazer-reformas-de-igualdade-de-genero-para-o-brasil/.
• 7
  Decree-Law 3,199 of April 14, 1941, established that “women will not be allowed to practice sports incompatible with the conditions of their nature, and, for this purpose, the National Sports Council (CND) must issue the necessary instructions to the sporting entities in the country.” (BRASIL, 1941, n/p). According to Salvini and Marchi Júnior (2013), the decree was revoked in 1975 by law 6251/75.
• 8
  In a brief survey, it is possible to highlight titles such as sixth Copa America championship (1991, 1995, 1998, 2003, 2010, 2014, and 2018), runner-up at the 2008 Beijing Olympics; champion at the 2007 Pan American Games, and runner-up at the 2007 World Cup.
• 9
  Athletes with shaved heads and over 23 years of age were banned (KNIJNIK & VASCONCEL-LOS, 2003).
• 10
  From other contexts, researchers such as Geurin-Eagleman and Burch (2016) and Perogaro, Comeau, and Frederick (2017) have given clues on the strategic uses that female athletes make of social networks such as Instagram. Geurin-Eagleman and Burch (2016), for example, analyzed posts by female Olympic athletes as a tool to produce a personal brand through personal photographs and in private environments, a strategy quite different from the way male athletes use this social network. Perogaro, Comeau, and Frederick (2017) analyzed the engagement associated with the hashtags #SheBelieves and #FIFAWWC of female athletes from the US football team during the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2015 and pointed out that the athletes privilege the representation of their athletic competence, challenging gender stereotypes in sport and positioning social networks as an inviting space to show women athletes in action.
• 11
  Cristiane Rozeira is the highest top scorer in the Olympic Games between men and women, with 14 goals scored between the four editions (2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016) she participated.
• 12
  No support from the clubs in the training of the athletes was identified in the images and videos posted by them.
• 13
  A group of authors have dedicated themselves to thinking about the knowledge related to body practices and how they are related in the teaching-learning processes. In this sense, Lazzarotti Filho, Silva, and Pires (2013) proposed the name Knowledge of Body Practices, Knowledge about body practices, and Pedagogical knowledge developed on/from body practices. Pinto and Vaz (2009) proposed a scheme for recording knowledge related to Physical Education: know/do and know about knowing how to do and the process of secondary education, understood as “a permanent exercise of reflection and understanding of what and how it is done in school. This third record implies a critical reflection on bodily practices, something that allow the student to locate before them, coming to know what they mean for different societies, groups, and him/herself as located in a history and with a memory” (p. 266). González and Bracht (2012) proposes the term “knowledge to practice” as a construction and appropriation of a set of experiences on/in the specificities of each body practice. Body knowledge for these authors involves the technical, tactical, and volitional dimensions of physical performance related to practice.
• 14
  Device used to measure blood pressure.
• 15
  Training with vascular occlusion consists of a technique that associates low-intensity resistance exercise with the restriction of blood flow to the muscles, generating results of increased muscle mass and strength similar to high-intensity resistance training (PATTERSON et al., 2019). According to Sato (2005), this technique was systematized from the mid-1996s and in the last 15 years, and a profusion of studies have been dedicated to investigating its foundations and effects.

Edited by

EDITORIAL BOARD

Alex Branco Fraga*, Elisandro Schultz Wittizorecki*, Ivone Job*, Mauro Myskiw*, Silvana Vilodre Goellner*

*Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Escola de Educação Física, Fisioterapia e Dança, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Mar 2021
• Date of issue
  2021

History

• Received
  22 Dec 2020
• Accepted
  15 Jan 2021
• Published
  26 Jan 2021