A fertility citizenship – women’s health policies as technologies of sex and gender production

Abstract

This article analyzes how the main public policies on Brazilian women’s health, since 2000, define and characterize their target group. Marking an articulation between different sets of agents, disciplinary fields, and government technologies, public policies operate by representing and conforming the subject to whom they are intended. In women’s health field, this process is also made possible by modulating sex and gender, specifically reiterating codes responsible for designating the “nature” of women. This is a documentary research conducted via the anthropological perspective of documents analysis, which investigated the documentary pieces of the Política Nacional de Atenção Integral à Saúde da Mulher (2004) and Rede Cegonha (2011) and related documents. The themes of fertility and reproduction have been persistent in the set of actions in women’s health, making up the core areas that concentrate state efforts and funds. The woman embraced by health policies has greater chances of accessing her citizenship rights from her role as a potential reproducer. The complex construction of a subject of rights is identified, even when this construction was imbued with a certain emancipatory ideology, in the interstices of the State.