Entre lésbicas 60+: o prazer como pedagogia do cuidado

Abstract

This dissertation aims to study the designs of care and pleasure/health among elderly lesbians. It aims to understand the production of meanings of lesbian care in the experience of women over 60 years old, taking as an enunciative plan the care practices that design each other. It also aims to verify the (im)possible micropolitics in health/pleasure in the sociabilities of the interlocutors through an ethnography, using the technique of participant observation in lesbian parties in the city of Rio de Janeiro and interviews with two elderly lesbian women who are part of Articulation Brazilian Lesbian Association (ABL). If the LGBTQIA+ community has been studied based on its pains and “disadvantages'', as stated by Goldenberg about the devalued body in the aesthetic perspective and that compromise the seduction potential of these bodies, here we think about which life routes have done and whether we can conjecture around a pedagogy and ethics of care in the promotion of pleasure, therefore, health and the affirmation of life. Would this arrangement allow for some margin of freedom in the face of biopolitical strategies, the ways of conducting the body in the plots of health or living? To think about the promotion of life, it is necessary to think about the governments of life and which bodies have been able to live in their full rights. We bring the question about how elderly lesbians have circumvented the health markers that have fixed aging as illness, pain and – in degeneration , together with the central question: how and if they have lived and acted their sexuality in a context hostile to lesbians. Care, the central point of this work, has faced challenges in the context of neoliberal advances that, with the dominance of biomedicine, is placed in a reality of the commodification of health and the medicalization of life, hence our sexuality and individual responsibility for our futures, mainly in the case of women. It was concluded that despite the violence marked by lesbophobia, these women mobilize care and pleasure in their trajectories through social movements and their constructions of lesbian subjectivities.