Intersectional and territorial exclusion in Brazil's aging policy field: A critical analysis of access to bodily practices and inequalities.

Brazil is aging rapidly, and deep social and territorial inequalities shape who can take part in the socially and culturally constituted forms of physical activity and leisure of later life (bodily practices). We asked how Brazil's aging policy documents frame active aging and access to these practices, and how they reproduce or challenge inequality. We analyzed 14 governmental, intergovernmental, and institutional documents published between 1994 and 2025, assembling and coding the corpus between January and June 2025. We combined reflexive thematic analysis with a critical, poststructural reading of policy discourse, guided by intersectional and decolonial perspectives. We identified four interconnected mechanisms: (1) under universalism and erasure, documents treat older adults as one neutral group; (2) under responsibilization and moralized autonomy, they ask people to manage their own aging even while naming structural conditions; (3) under territorialized implementation gaps, they leave pathways loosely specified across unequal municipalities; and (4) under metrics, recognition, and policy silence, they rarely disaggregate by race, gender, or territory, which limits what policy can see and address. Taken together, the findings suggest that universal rights-based commitments may leave intersecting inequities insufficiently addressed. Such commitments stay broad promises unless implementation and monitoring name the racialized, gendered, economic, and territorial conditions people live in. For critical gerontology and public health, the study shows how policy categories and silences shape who is recognized in later life, in Brazil and across Latin America and the wider Global South.