On the margins of care: gender regulations in a health care team

Abstract

From a feminist perspective, this article analyzes how a healthcare team weaves care networks and defines health practices from the course of a female user. The methodology used is the intervention research inspired by the cartographic perspective. In the attempt to reduce mother-and-child mortality rates, the staff offers female user a network that obeys a bureaucratic logic with rules, norms and regulations. We can notice how policies for maternity define processes of subjectivation responsible for shaping the female users, outlining rigid performative acts. The healthcare team eventually requires the female users’ bodies in different ways by the fact that they are women. In most cases those users are mothers and poor, which involves singularities in relation to their trajectories and to the way the teams regard them. Tubal ligation, pre-natal care, care with house and children, access to certain benefits, together are elements that guide the staffs’ decisions and act as technologies for gender regulation able to legitimate quotidian institutional violence. The politicization of the technical-scientific practices becomes urgent in order to ensure that issues on human and social rights may be part of the daily routine of teams that work in those territories.

Keywords:
gender identity; violence; social discrimination; public policies; primary health care