Da oralização à sinalização: os discursos e práticas da surdez no campo da saúde

Abstract

This study questions the discursive production of deafness in the health scenario. Its objective was to problematize the deafness discourses and practices that produce health care for deaf people in this field. For that, it operated with the concepts of discourse, power and normalization inspired by Michel Foucault and the authors of Education and Health who use the cultural and Foucaultian perspective in their analyzes, among them authors of the Deaf Studies. The production of the empirical material occurred by: observation with record in the field diary, open interviews and document analysis. Leaders / technicians (5) and health service professionals (11) from the municipality under examination were interviewed; municipal counselors (2) deaf people (5) and their family members (5) from the city of Sobral-Ce, from 2016 to 2019. The categories of analysis were constituted, considering the articulation between the discursive productions of the interviewees, the government documents and observations recorded in the field diary. It was defined what was intended to be extracted from the discursive corpus so that the analytical exercise was performed around the discourses that support the organization of health care for these users and the subtle strategies of power operated in these services when attending the deaf. Initially, the organization of the services was described, and then the discourses on which this attention was anchored were analyzed, showing the subtle power relations exerted in this space and in the daily life of these people. We observed the recurrent statements, those that appear as crystallized and regular practices, and, in turn, the discourses with less recurrence, those that emerged in the studied scenario, which were new. The articulation between the two axes of analysis made it possible to argue that deafness is a sanitary practice, a novelty, which articulates curative and rehabilitative practices with prevention and health promotion practices, starting to intervene not only in the deafness clinic but in the past. was done in philanthropic-educational spaces, as they forge collective practices, directing their actions also to the population body, when deafness is positioned as a public health problem, responding to the power play of professional corporations that socially established themselves to meet these users. The health care exercised is materialized under the auditor standard articulated with the sanitary discourse. The practices aimed at deaf people when taking the population body as object of their action, accentuated the exercise of normalizing practices in the deaf body. Crossed by resistance practices, sign language vies for space to enter health, stressing a reconfiguration in practices to care for deaf people in this environment.