Vale o quanto pesa? A biopolítica na seleção de professor da rede pública

Abstract

Obesity has been the subject of several researches in several areas of knowledge that show its significant increase in the Brazilian population in the last thirty years. Also subject of research in the last decades has been the functional sickness of teachers, such studies demonstrate that this situation is widespread and is present in different networks of the Brazilian public education system. The volume of medical leave taken by teachers as a result of illness, the costs of such removals from the public administration of education and the challenges brought by these absences to school management have also been referred to in these surveys. In the last eight years it was observed a relevant number of occurrences of teachers being rejected in contest for teacher of the public network, after the medical examination that alleged obesity of the candidates. Such criticisms have aroused several denunciations observed in several journalistic reports that warned about the unconstitutionality of the action by the State. The objective of this research was to analyze the reasons that justify the reprovals in medical expertise due to obesity in public teacher competition, verifying if the increase of the rigor of the medical examinations can be considered a security device by which the State tries to mitigate the effects the high rate of sickness of teachers followed by leave for medical leave. In order to do so, a review of the literature of the recent researches on the health of the Basic Education teacher in Brazil was carried out, which assisted in the exploration of the empirical corpus of the research that was the site JusBrasil, a page that brings together jurisprudences (which consist of appeals against the result of the expertise) of all spheres of the Brazilian Legal System. The analysis of the data collected in the portal used the methodology of discourse analysis Discourse Analysis of Foucault matrix. What was found in the examination of the material is that excluding a candidate with obesity because he or she has a higher risk of becoming ill in the future and moving away from the position may be considered a preventive strategy for the administration of school systems for non-teachers considered ill. In addition, the increase in the rigor of medical examinations can be considered as an apparatus of security adopted by the State to deal with the effects of the sickness of teachers and their effects of medical licenses.