Entre saúde e aprimoramento: a engenharia do corpo por meio de cirurgias plásticas e terapias hormonais no Brasil
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: This paper explores medical borderlands where health and enhancement practices are entangled. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the context of two distinct research projects in Brazil on plastic surgery and sex hormone therapies. These two therapies have significant clinical overlap. Both are made available in private and public healthcare in ways that reveal the class dynamics underlying Brazilian medicine. They also have an important experimental dimension rooted in Brazil's regulatory context and societal expectations placed on medicine as a means for managing women's reproductive and sexual health. Off-label and experimental medical use of these treatments is linked to experimental social use: how women adopt them to respond to the pressures, anxieties and aspirations of work and intimate life. The paper argues that these experimental techniques are becoming morally authorized as routine management of women's health, integrated into mainstream Ob-Gyn healthcare, and subtly blurred with practices of cuidar-se (self-care) seen in Brazil as essential for modern femininity.
Authors: Alexander Edmonds, Emilia Sanabria
Institutions: University of Edinburgh, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2322956528