Mulheres em luta : um mapeamento do ativismo dentro do universo gravídico-puerperal

Abstract

The present research entitled “WOMEN IN STRUGGLE: a mapping of activism within the gravid-puerperal universe” aims to analyze the correlations of forces and disputes that occur around the assistance provided during the conception, pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion and puerperium, based on the reports of women engaged in this field and working within the limits of the city of Belo Horizonte, MG, and its metropolitan region, from the beginning of the millennium to 2019. The working hypotheses are: [1] that women would become activists from a perception of power asymmetries in the attention to the pregnancy-puerperal cycle and [2] that, from then on, they would turn to collective action, generating not only personal cognitive learning, but also a shared community awareness. In order to fulfill the aforementioned goal: we discussed the notions of biopower, sexual division of labor, intersectionality and the critical-emancipatory field of differences; we rescued the relationship between women, women's movements and the state in relation to the reproductive health agenda, from colonial Brazil to 2019. The work was oriented according to feminist epistemologies and took shape as a political ethnography, in which we employ, firstly, participant observation – developed in various events, circles of pregnant and puerperal women, meetings with activists collectives and the Municipal Health Secretariat, as a form of immersion in the field – and, later, questionnaires applied together with semi-structured interviews. The answers to the questionnaires and the interviews, carried out with 16 women working in the discussions about the humanization of care to the pregnancy-puerperal cycle, provided a substrate for the application of the Framing Analysis. With this analysis, we defined 9 categories (militancy trajectory; initial motivation to enter the field; meanings of activism around the pregnancy-puerperal cycle; identified obstacles; identified allies and paths; socio-political perception; types of engagement and strategies used in the field; effects and projections; types of engagement and strategies used in the field for membership adhesion) constituting 5 Collective Action Frames (nature of activism; diagnosis; prognosis; motivational and master framework). We conclude that obstetric violence is a dimension that permeates the senses and, consequently, the strategies used in the field and that the activists mobilize both alone and collectively to face this phenomenon.