TY - JOUR
T1 - The politics of clinic and critique in Southern Brazil
AU - Behague, Dominique
N1 - Funding Information:
I thank my colleagues of the Federal University of Pelotas, Helen Gonçalves, Cesar Victora, Fernando Barros, and many others, for supporting this research in manifold ways. Warmest gratitude to Sean Brotherton, Ken MacLeish, Laura Stark, Eugene Raikhel, Brianne Wesolowski, and William Minter for the wonderful feedback on previous iterations of this article, and to four anonymous reviewers and the editors of Theory, Culture & Society for their astute and transformative insights. I benefited greatly from feedback provided by colleagues at the Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, as well as The Medical Anthropology Research Center of the University of Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, where this research was presented. Finally, my deepest thanks to the many young people, families and professionals in Pelotas who welcomed me (and my questions) with warmth and wisdom. The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Béhague was the recipient of a US National Science Foundation doctoral fellowship and a postdoctoral fellowship from The Wellcome Trust (Grant No. GR077175MA). The ethnographic portions of the 1982 Pelotas cohort study were funded by The Wellcome Trust, the World Health Organisation, the Pan American Health Organisation, the European Union, and Programa Nacional para Centros de Excelência (PRONEX).
Funding Information:
I thank my colleagues of the Federal University of Pelotas, Helen Gonçalves, Cesar Victora, Fernando Barros, and many others, for supporting this research in manifold ways. Warmest gratitude to Sean Brotherton, Ken MacLeish, Laura Stark, Eugene Raikhel, Brianne Wesolowski, and William Minter for the wonderful feedback on previous iterations of this article, and to four anonymous reviewers and the editors of Theory, Culture & Society for their astute and transformative insights. I benefited greatly from feedback provided by colleagues at the Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, as well as The Medical Anthropology Research Center of the University of Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, where this research was presented. Finally, my deepest thanks to the many young people, families and professionals in Pelotas who welcomed me (and my questions) with warmth and wisdom. The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Béhague was the recipient of a US National Science Foundation doctoral fellowship and a postdoctoral fellowship from The Wellcome Trust (Grant No. GR077175MA). The ethnographic portions of the 1982 Pelotas cohort study were funded by The Wellcome Trust, the World Health Organisation, the Pan American Health Organisation, the European Union, and Programa Nacional para Centros de Excelência (PRONEX).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.
PY - 2022/11
Y1 - 2022/11
N2 - Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil’s post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people’s lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault’s biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people’s theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem’s concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars’ work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden ‘storm-and-stress’ adolescent. Young people’s subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life.
AB - Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil’s post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people’s lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault’s biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people’s theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem’s concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars’ work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden ‘storm-and-stress’ adolescent. Young people’s subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129040132&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/02632764221076430
DO - 10.1177/02632764221076430
M3 - Article
SN - 1460-3616
VL - 39
SP - 43
EP - 61
JO - Theory, Culture & Society
JF - Theory, Culture & Society
IS - 6
ER -