Paper short abstract:

How does a group of aging capeverdean males from Praia deal with transformations in the presentation of the gendered bodies in their country and their own bodily experiences of aging ?

Paper long abstract:

Ruptures in the presentation of the gendered bodies and in the development of the practices they entail, can be situated and described during the last two decades of democratic regime in Cape Verde. These changes will be presented through a short history of the diversification of styles, traced both through observations as well as through popular music. Transformations in body presentation are central to the transformations of gender relations and interactions.

Criteria, norms, associated values and the importance of the body have changed, but so have the bodies (and their capacities and forms) of our interlocutors, men from Praia in their late 4O's, the author has been interacting with for the last two decades.

Those two processes confront them with the clear difficulty of performing the ideal masculine self they were socialised to perform; their subjectivity is transformed. The tensions experienced by those men are both related to social and personal transformations.

This observation calls in a sane perspectivist approach in the articulation between body and society. Nevertheless, analysing the different reactions of men facing these challenges allows in fact to delineate contemporary processes of social differentiation and transformation of subjectivities where place of origin, spatial location in the city, youthism and gender are central.