Feminilidades sertanejas e vidas medicalizadas: escritas de si e narrativas de mulheres no sertão seridoense

Abstract

With this research, I question the production of psychic suffering of women from the northeastern, backlands and how their bodies relate to the medicalization of life, from the creation of an autonomous medication management group - GAM, which was called GAMMulheres. I identify the universal subject of some feminisms, centered on Eurocentric, white, intellectualized and heterosexual women, as insufficient and limiting to understand the social and political condition of northeastern sertaneja women. Based on questions such as these, I aim to discuss the modes of subjectivation of country women in psychological distress and medicalized, in the city of Currais Novos - RN. As specific objectives, I intend to: (a) identify the effects, meanings and perceptions of medicalization in the lives of women in a city in the northeastern hinterland; (b) discuss how issues of race, class, gender and territory make up the psychological suffering of women in the countryside; (c) discuss the experience of country women with affective and sexual work, such as maternal and domestic work, and (d) identify how these experiences relate to their psychological suffering. This study is constituted as a cartography woven through women's narratives. I defend the embodied and incarnated writing of women as a way of overcoming the academicism sustained by the writing of white, elitist and Eurocentric men, in an attempt to affirm a scientific knowledge that is based on ethics and the experience of historically situated knowledge. (Haraway, 2009; Collins, 2019). The participants in this cartography were women of different races, classes, generations, sexualities and different territories of the city in which the experience took place. The analysis of the women's self-narratives was concluded, based on the methodological proposal of Butler (2015) and Rago (2013), built through cartographic diaries and audio recordings, which remained as archives of the meetings of the GAM-Mulheres group. The analyzed results discuss: 1) who are the medicalized women in the backlands; 2) the biopolitical effects of psychotropic drug use on women's bodies and lives; 3) how experiences with domestic work, the maternal role and marriage, based on colonial, patriarchal and sexist values, contribute to the process of psychological suffering of these women.