Saúde das Mulheres Lésbicas: diálogos com as Políticas Públicas de Saúde da Mulher

Abstract

This research analyzes what public health policies aimed at the Women's Health Care Program paved the way for and proposed to advance the effective inclusion of the lesbian women population. To this end, it starts with a discussion on the participation of biological sciences in the construction of a certain notion about women that reinforces biological justifications for social insertions. This way, it promotes the exclusion of dissident sexualities from the binary/ heteronormative logic. The research carried out a review of the literature on the health of lesbian women in Brazil, covering the period between 2006 and 2018. The keywords used were: lesbians; health; Brazil. Documents published and disseminated by the Ministry of Health, between 1984 to 2016, were also analyzed. Those documents presented guidelines to inform the implementation of services as well as the performance of the health teams serving the female population across the national territory. The research revealed discontinuities, limitations and omissions in the proposals identified in the presentation of those texts, which remained subsumed or even absent in each document, especially when compared to the guidelines for other groups also covered in those papers. The analysis of the documents also identified contradictions regarding the proposal to include the lesbian population in the Women's Health Care Program. On one hand, it recognizes the existence of this group. On the other hand, it supports the perspective that female sexuality is preferentially and predominantly heterosexual in a fixed, constant and coherent way throughout all stages of life. The consequence of that is the primacy of heteronormativity in the field of women's health.