Becoming a Men in Brazilian Urban Peripheral Areas: Gender and Youth in the Margins

Who are young men in the Brazilian periphery? What do they want, and how do they live? These are the central question guiding the present research. The objective is to understand the construction of masculinity among young men living in urban margins, analyzing their gender socialization and the shaping of their subjectivity across multiple dimensions: work, sexuality, family, friendships, housing, future aspirations, and more. The methodology includes focus groups and longitudinal life trajectory interviews conducted with young men aged 15 to 29 from a peripheral neighborhood of Porto Alegre (South of Brazil), as well as digital ethnography carried out on the social media platform Instagram. Based on data collected between 2021 and 2024, I examine the cross-cutting aspects of these young men’s lives to capture how they do their gender, drawing on the plural actor theory (Lahire, 2002). I argue that young men in Brazil’s urban periphery experience a precarious and accelerated transition to adulthood, characterized, for instance, by domestic confinement, the abandonment of leisure spaces, limited sexual relationships, early departure from parental homes, and premature marriage. These "working" young men forgo the necessary time for transitional processes, as engaging in them risks their association with the gender practices of who inhabit the same territory but are involved in criminal activities and violence. In this process, the costs of incorporating masculinity extend beyond the already well-documented drawbacks of early entry into the labor market. In addition to being workers with fewer tools to compete for better positions, these men are constrained to a single expression of masculinity, reinforcing, for those on the margins, a traditional sexist version of manhood, with all its attendant implications.