I actually started researching masculinity and media in 1994. During my undergraduate studies I conducted a 2 year research project with the magazine Ele Ela. It was financed by The State of São Paulo's Research Support Fund (FAPESP), under the orientation of Professor Margareth Rago (History Department). I also had considerable help from Inês Signorini and Ângela Kleinman (both from the Applied Linguistics Department). It was during this period that I got in touch with internet activism from people like Michael Flood, and actually saw the PROFEM list be created out of the American Men's Studies Association (AMSA) list discutions. Out of that research I produced one article in English entitled "Him/Her: Discourses of Masculinity in a Brazilian Magazine, 1969-1972". The final results of that first research were published in book form, under the title Have Pity on Men! Changing masculinities (available only in Portuguese).

     In 1998 I began my Master's in Social Anthropology, and finished in November of 2000. That research had as its main objective the analysis of three contemporary Brazilian men’s magazines: VIP Exame, Sui Generis e Homens. This involved an observation of the social processes of production of the magazines as well as an analysis of the representations of masculinity present in the final printed product, the magazines themselves. The results point to what I called a recontextualization of binary oppositions, primarily male/female and homosexual/heterosexual. These oppositions are explored in the pages of the magazines and also function as general guidelines (even though implicit) of the processes of creation of the magazines. Two magazines work very similarly with these binary opposites, by virtue of their celebration of them: VIP Exame and Sui Generis, which are respectively aimed at heterosexual and homosexual male readers. The magazine Homens, on the contrary, is here analyzed as a counter example, because of the absence of these distinctions in its pages; here we find rather the use of a distinction between active/passive as central to the representations, in a magazine based exclusively on pornography. An English article from that research is available now, called Contemporary Male Homoeroticism in Brazilian Gay Magazines: The case of Sui Generis and Homens.

     I finished my PhD in Social Sciences in June 2005, with a thesis entitled Dilemas of the Human: reinventing the body in a (bio)technological era. For more information on the thesis and that research, please visit the site of the project: Social Studies in (Bio)Technology.