Práticas contraceptivas e gestão da heterossexualidade: agência individual, contextos relacionais e gênero.

Abstract

The thesis deals with the major issues relating to contraception in Brazil. Integrates an effort to analyze behaviors related to contraception, according to logics that prioritize the situatedness and relationality of such phenomena. Strategies to manage fertility are constitutive of heterosexual sexuality. Women and men can use contraception or not; the reasons for that conduct extrapolate aspects concerning information and access. We seek to understand contraceptive practices from the process of learning of relational logic and gender, at different times of biographies: the beginning of the affective-sexual trajectory, the contexts of eruption of pregnancy and termination of reproductive potential by means contraceptive sterilization. This composite require use of different empirical materials for the construction and analysis of the stages of elected biographies. It focuses, first, the passing moment sexuality with a partner. Problematizes the idea of relaxation of contraceptive practices, from the sexual initiation, current design in the national literature due to the decrease in condom use in sex later. We discuss then the attitudes and issues present in the construction process of contraceptive practice, at the time the sexual life becomes regular. The proposition from the perspective of contraceptive management emphasizes the positions of the protagonists, marked by gender. Finally, we analyze the biographical circumstances and relational scenarios of contraceptive sterilization, which emerges as a strategy of stabilization or consolidation of a contraceptive / reproductive route. The debate around the contraception in Brazil has a tendency to emphasize the social determining to explain unexpected pregnancies. However, it is noted based on a critical literature, the dimensions of individual agency, although circumscribed by a delimited range of possibilities.