Entre gestos, escritas e uma político-clínica das desimportâncias: catado de estórias sobre mulheres e cuidado

Abstract

This research is conceived as a gathering of stories about care practices produced by women in encounters between mental health services and the territories of traditional peoples and communities along the coastal waters of Sergipe. Its objective is to follow how care processes participate in the production of subjectivities and what clues, emerging from these encounters, make it possible to understand their forces of capture and their potential to invent other ways of existing and caring. The research problem arises from the tension between the position occupied by the researcher as a health professional and the historical processes that position women as caregivers, in a context marked by the feminization of care and the invisibilization of the forms of work that sustain life. The study is grounded in the understanding that care constitutes a contradictory field, traversed both by regulatory gender norms and by gestures capable of producing deviations, resistance, and other ways of sustaining life. Methodologically, the research draws on cartography, understood as a research-intervention method aimed at following processes of subjectivation, and on Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Writing experimentation is taken as a mode of producing data, selves, and worlds, in an exercise of gathering stories, gestures, memories, affects, and silences around women, care, and territories of life. Organized into “breaths,” the dissertation follows scenes that produce concepts and offer clues about the pedagogies that produce women as caregivers, the invisible work involved in creating the conditions for care, everyday choreographies of protection in the face of violence, and the shared construction of intelligibilities about forms of suffering related to these gendered pedagogies. The analyses also indicate that the collective production of care can transform sensibilities and expand repertoires of response, giving rise to a politics of care generated by and among women as a form of defending and expanding life, referred to in this research as a politico-clinical practice of unimportance. The stories are not treated as illustrations of theory, but are followed as producers of knowledge and subjectivities. Writing thus becomes part of the very gesture of caring, as an ethical-political practice that makes visible the forms of unimportance that sustain life and affirms care as a field of dispute between capture and the creation of a proliferating womanly life.