Between the worker and the vagabond: Production of masculinities in the history of health in Brazil

Abstract

The Comprehensive Healthcare Policy for Men (PNAISH) emerges in 2009, presenting as object of attention the male social body. Given that men's health is a current theme in gender studies, we seek to recapture the main movemens of social production of masculinities crossed by medicalization in different historical conjunctures. To that end, we rely on post-structuralist conceptual operators that seek to take masculinities as product of certain contexts characterized by relations of power-knowledge and gender, as well as other social markers. Analysis points to the conditions of possibility that led certain masculinities to the field of abjection through racial marking and the labor device as a strategy of power for the medicalization of male social body. In this area, the Brazilian version of masculinities transits along the bondary line between the worker and the vagabond, a line drawn by medicalizati on and criminalization mechanisms that operate concurrently.