“Eles pensa que a gente não somo humanos, nós samos”: uma análise feminista da maternidade para mulheres que fazem usos de substâncias psicoativas em situação de vulnerabilidades

Abstract

This thesis investigates the experience of motherhood of women mothers who use psychoactive substances, in a context of vulnerabilities. The theoretical-methodological horizon was based on feminist theoretical approaches, with contributions from black feminist epistemology, especially the Intersectional Theory and the perspective of Reproductive Justice, associated with the Theoretical Framework of Vulnerability. The empirical material of the thesis was produced between July 2019 and February 2020, in the Program Run pro Abraço of the Government of the State of Bahia, through the use of elements of feminist ethnography, intertwined with the resources of individual and group interviews. These strategies aimed to approach women-mothers who use psychoactive substances, in a context of vulnerabilities. For the examination of the research corpus, the Foucaultian discourse analysis was used. The research aimed to analyze how women-mothers who use psychoactive substances in a context of vulnerability narrate and experience the experience of motherhood and what meanings they attribute to it. The analyzes allowed us to problematize the construction of an idealized maternity based on a universalizing white reference that integrates a logic of dehumanization of black women-mothers in situations of vulnerability. I emphasize the personal, social and institutional violence suffered mainly as a result of racism, constituted, according to Foucault, by a definition of profiles whose specific effect would be the election of those who "let themselves live and let die", marking a power strategy, whose function it would be to elect or subordinate human beings according to their race, highlighting the technologies of control over reproduction, shaping different situations of oppression. The analyzes indicate that the reproductive rights that circumscribe maternity need to be integrated with other rights; namely: housing, work, education, food, health, among others. In this sense, the absence of specific public policies that reach this audience produces personal, social and institutional vulnerabilities, (re)producing the cultural effect of naming a “deviant maternity”. That said, it can be said that motherhood considered deviant says more about the negligence of the State and Society than the “inability” of these women to generate motherhood. Thus, a sensitive look at the speeches of the women-mothers and the interviewed professionals allowed them to "find" clues regarding the naturalization of the relationship between motherhood, PAS use in a context of vulnerabilities and the various obliterations of rights that women mothers are exposed. The research intended to denaturalize and show some of these types of violence that are still active in culture, which contribute to its maintenance in institutional spaces and make it difficult to scale a specific demand for care. It demonstrates, among other findings, the need for public policies of intersectoral support to maternity, in order to make it a possible choice to be experienced, in a dignified and safe way. Also highlighted is the redimensioning of female autonomy and protagonism, in relation to reproductive issues, directly linked to the conditions of their community, therefore beckoning the guarantee of individual and collective human rights.