Entre sinapses e hormônios: medicalização do amor, subjetividades e a bioética dos afetos e das intimidades.

Abstract

In this work, I map and analyze the relationships between (a) spaces, concepts and practices of formal knowledge production, (b) the forging of health and disease categories, and (c) the offer and practice of techniques and technologies of care. The research here presented explores the literature on the medicalization of love considering its authors and the neuroscientific theories that serve as reference to it. Through the exploration of these materials, I try to redeem the genealogy of ideas that are relevant to the medicalization of love, and that show themselves active within research questions, experimentation protocols, screenings and diagnosis, treatments and, therefore, within modes of subjectivation and affective and intimate arrangements. My aim is to look at the traffic of ideas and practices that takes place between different scientific fields, overseeing instances like bioethics, public politics and common sense. I take the materials I analyzed to be neurobionarratives that situate human affectivity in the body and that, by placing reproduction as the main end of all human affective manifestation, narrate preset scripts of intimate configurations. The text articulates the bibliographic materials that coproduce the medicalization of love with interviews produced during the PhD research and with the ethnography of a Practical Ethics course in Princeton University, audited between September and December of 2017. Through the interviews, I had access to ways of practicing and understanding bioethics today as bioethicists interlocution with other fields of knowledge. The interview with a psychiatrist from the Pathological Love Program of a public hospital in São Paulo helps showing the application (or not) of the concepts used in bioethics and neurosciences and their operation in patients diagnosis and forms of care. With the help on analytical concepts forged within Science and Technology Studies, around the literature biosocialities, and also in reference to critical and feminist studies, I try to critically throw light on the entanglement of styles, conventions and practices that traverse and connect labs and institutes of international prestige that draw considerable amounts of resources and also participate in the public health system. In the cartography that is put together, I illuminate different modes, spaces and temporalities of subjectivation, that vary according to limits and possibilities encountered amidst different theoretical perspectives, practices of care, and redesigning of the selves. This route puts us in contact, finally, with the transformations the idea of subjectivity in itself is going through. This work points to a multiplicity of ideas and ideologies in dialogue, but also to some nexuses where they meet and around which consensus and dissent are constructed. The subject they relate to shows itself to be a pharmaceuticalized one, one that is approached easily through biochemical rates and less easily assessed through their singularity; one that is treated based on the moral evaluation of their behavior and constantly reminded of it.