A discussão internacional sobre a ética do cuidado: aportes teóricos para a compreensão do trabalho de cuidado como experiência concreta

Abstract

The Ethics of Care is a perspective that has become relevant within the current feminist debate, since it analyzes various issues and dimensions of care, studying it in its individual, social and political aspects. In this sense, given the importance of this approach to the understanding of care, the first objective of this article is to present some of the central aspects of the discussion that has been developed by researchers of the Ethics of Care internationally. For that, a bibliographical survey was carried out on the Ethics of Care, mainly from the academic discussion that has developed in France on the subject, one of the countries in which the question is more popular nowadays. Considering that the studies on Care Ethics present three axes of analysis around care, care as ethics, care as politics and care as work, the article will seek to present some aspects of the discussion around the axis of care as work or “lived experience”. At this point, we introduce the thinking of the French researcher Pascale Molinier, who analyzes the skills and competencies that are born from the experience of care and can only be learned and shared by the practice and the narratives of the care workers. On another words, care escapes the criteria related to professionalization/qualification/ specialization. Giving centrality to the concrete experiences of care, counted in the form of narratives by the workers, it is possible to observe senses of care, practices, skills essential to good care. Listening and valuing the subaltern and silenced voices of care workers then leads to a number of issues relevant to the discussion of care work in Brazil and around the world.