“Eu não sou a Mulher Maravilha”: as implicações do trabalho reprodutivo para o adoecimento mental das mulheres

Abstract

The present research had as general objective to analyze the relation between the overload of the reproductive work in the life of the women and their mental illness. It is a bibliographical and documentary research, built in the light of historical-dialectical materialism as the main method of analysis. The choice for this problem came from the experience of mandatory internship in Social Work, in a service of the psychosocial network of Natal-CAPS III, East. In order to apprehend reality, some categories of analysis were listed, such as: patriarchal gender relations, sexual division of labor, reproductive work, physical and psychological suffering. The observations collected from our insertion in the referred institution aroused questions and interest in further analyzing this phenomenon. Thus, it appears that reproductive work in the lives of women can be considered a potentializing and determining element for their physical and mental health, however, this is little debated, on the one hand, it appears in the field of naturalization and invisibility by families, the State and society as a whole, and on the other hand it is medicalized, usually treated as an individual problem. Furthermore, it is important to build collective strategies that affirm physical and mental health in a broader way by intervening in the social determinants of women's health, among them, work in the field of social reproduction.