Entroncamentos de si : masculinidades juvenis em dissidência e cartografias afeto-territoriais em Feira de Santana – Bahia

Abstract

This dissertation investigates junctions of existence in which dissident youth masculinities are made and remade through circulation across the city-school-university of Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil. It is guided by the question of how young people negotiate visibility, safety, belonging, and affection in everyday life, producing territories of shelter and zones of high cost in contexts traversed by gender norms and markers of difference. The study is grounded in Everyday Life Studies and in gender and sexuality studies, articulating a cartographic perspective in three acts, Cartografar, Narrar, and Habitar (Mapping, Narrating, and Inhabiting), with attention to the body as a mode of knowing and to ordinary practices as a knowledge of living. The empirical material consists of narratives produced in interviews with five participants, trans and cis men aged 20 to 24. The analytical procedure adopts a discourse-oriented reading attentive to conditions of enunciation and to the materiality of saying, treating rhythm, choices of naming, silences, and points of tension as clues for understanding experiences and relations. Findings are organized into three analytical axes. The first follows urban and school circuits as practical grammars of what becomes possible, showing how trajectories are made through adjustments of time, companionship, staying, and exposure. The second interprets meanings attributed to affective territories, showing how certain places become shelter, belonging, memory, risk, and self-recomposition. The third focuses on everyday tactics of negotiation, understood as small, non-heroic gestures that sustain presence, bonds, and care amid regimes of surveillance and regulation. Overall, the analysis shows that the city-school-university produces differentiated costs of existing while also offering openings for invention, through which circuits and tactics reorient what is possible and sustain plural ways of inhabiting. It further indicates that self-formation is produced in the dentrofora (insideoutside), that is, both within educational spaces and in the edges, gaps, and circulations that traverse them.