"Foreign Sports Curiosities": circulation of images of female bodies in Uruguayan illustrated magazines in the 1930s

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Uruguay underwent a period of intense modernisation, which significantly impacted its political, urban, and cultural structures. In this context, periodical publications played a central role in shaping sensibilities, consumption patterns, and bodily prescriptions. Among the topics covered, sport gained increasing prominence, especially regarding women's participation in physical activities. This article aims to investigate how the Uruguayan illustrated magazines Anales Revista Nacional, Rush, and Deportes constructed models of female physical culture based on foreign references, and how these representations influenced national body ideals. The adopted methodology focused on analysing images and texts from the "Curiosidades del deporte extranjero" ("Curiosities of Foreign Sport") section, present in all three magazines, considering images as key indicators for understanding the symbolic construction of female bodies in print media. The results show that, at a time when women's sports were still seeking recognition in Uruguay, illustrated magazines played a crucial role as agents of cultural legitimation, disseminating models of the body, discipline, and movement that reflected foreign trends and offered prescriptions for national physical culture. It is concluded that the value assigned to female physical culture abroad was adopted by Uruguayan publications as an aspirational horizon, transforming these magazines into spaces that not only informed but also proposed ways of being and inhabiting the female body. In doing so, they outlined a visual pedagogy that defined what was desirable, legitimate, and possible for women in the sporting landscape of 1930s Uruguay.