Doulagem em cena: desigualdades, direitos e disputas em torno de uma nova profissão do parir

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the field of doulaship, the practices, meanings and discourses of doulas. Doulas are educated women with theoretical and practical knowledge about assisting pregnant women, parturients and puerperal women, who offer emotional and physical support. They also provide qualified information on the processes and procedures involved in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. By discussing a bibliography that deals with science, gender, the state, nature, culture and the moralities imposed on the female body, articulating the debate on care in the pregnancy-puerperium cycle, motherhood from an anthropological perspective and feminist criticism, the aim is to reflect on how these professionals act on a daily basis and what external and internal disputes they are involved in. To this end, three methodological fronts were explored: descriptive, exploratory and ethnographic, using bibliographic review techniques, document analysis, participant observation and interviews with doulas. The first chapter explores the history of the field of women's health care and childbirth in Brazil, seeking to explore how this care was structured in the medical-hospital sphere, the basis on which the medicalization model and the technocratic ideal developed, and how humanization ideals, policies and programmes came into vogue. This chapter will also include a brief discussion of the feminist debate on the subject.This chapter also provides a brief discussion of the contemporary feminist debate and its relationship with motherhood and influences in the field of health, an emphasis that can be considered important for the dissemination of the profession of doulas. The second chapter presents a survey of data on the field of doulaship, both from a historical and social perspective of the movement, as well as recent struggles, positions and issues, the daily practices of doulas, their perceptions and discourses. Through participant-observation and interviews, I try to present the trajectories and discourses of doulas and reflect on these life and professional stories, aspects of the daily work practices of doulas and important milestones in the field, along the lines of regulation, professionalization and appreciation of the category. In the third and final chapter, still based on the trajectories of the doula interlocutors, a more elaborate and plural analysis of the field is presented, seeking to highlight and compare the fundamental points, both common and divergent, in the discourses and practices of doulas. The aim is to highlight the diversity that can be found within the group, the different meanings that are attributed to the profession and its practices, valuing the breadth and density of the movement. The aim is to construct a kind of typology of doulaship, the differences found in the field elaborated as a continuum: activist, educator, alternative and spiritual doulas. The intention is to recognize doulaship as a network for the production and dissemination of knowledge that needs to resist the curtailment already historically characteristic of Western societies and confront the domination of biomedical knowledge about the female body and its processes, but also to highlight a vision that asks: What kind of doulaship are we talking about?