Serviço Social, Classe, Gênero e Raça: tendências teórico-metodológicas e as possíveis contribuições da Teoria Unitária

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the theoretical-methodological trends used in the scientific productions of the Brazilian Social Work regarding the gendered and racialized social relations of capitalist society, based on Marxist ontology and the critique of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). To this end, we understand that Social Work, recognized as an area of knowledge from its intellectual maturity viscerally articulated to Marxist thickening from the 1980s, began to develop research on diversified themes related to the complexity of social life under the Capital order, today systematized by the Thematic Research Groups (TRGs) of the Brazilian Association of Teaching and Research in Social Work (ABEPSS, for the Portuguese acronym). As a reflection of this movement, there is an expressive growth in the attempts by professionals to categorize the gendered and racialized social relations of capitalism. Through a broad and diversified theoretical and methodological framework, these analyses are based on different theoretical frameworks. We take as emblematic examples of this advance the adherences to Francophone materialist feminism and intersectional feminism as epistemological currents capable of providing heuristic tools for apprehend the condition of women and racialized people in capitalism, as well as the postmodern influx, which, less critically, subsidizes often fragmented analyses of social reality. In addition, we aim to a) map the main theoreticalmethodological frameworks developed in Social Work research on the relationship between class, gender, race and sexuality; b) analyze the contributions and theoretical-methodological limits of the Francophone materialist feminism, expressly one of the most used perspectives by researchers of feminism nowadays in Social Work and; c) apprehend how the relationship between Social Work and Marxist-feminism has been historically developed within the profession, demarcating the main determinations that limit and enable an analysis based on the social totality. This research, based on the Marxist method combined with the decolonial and Marxist-feminist point of view of the Unitary Theory, assumes that social production and reproduction are dimensions of a dialectically inseparable unit, systematically impacted by the reconfiguration of capitalist sociability. The SRT or Unitary Theory attempts to tune feminist praxis to Marxist theory based on Marx's value-work theory, in the understanding of capitalism as the founding totality of racism and a new patriarchy - in this research categorized as cisheteropatriarchy, through socio-historical processes constituting the social metabolism of capital. The research was methodologically constructed from bibliographic-exploratory research of a quantitative-qualitative nature and analyzed fifty (50) scientific articles published between 2010 and 2021 in the Temporalis Magazine. Data analysis indicates that the articles are located in three umbrella themes: Women, gender and feminisms in 64% of the articles; Race, ethnicity and anti-racist struggle in 22% and; Sexuality, sexual diversity and LGBT+ struggle in 14%. The articles analyzed are classified into four trends: 1) Marxist criticism; 2) formal-descriptive; 3) eclectic-postmodern criticism; and 4) undefined. We found an expressive epistemological effort made by the category of social assistants in deepening studies on gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality from a critical perspective, despite the use of different authors based on diversified theoretical frameworks. In an attempt to continually advance, this research considers that the conception of Unitary Theory can offer the materialization of a deeper harmony between Marxism and feminist and anti-racist praxis, in the ontological perspective of knowledge production, based on historical-dialectical materialism and, in this sense, contribute to the development of a Marxist-feminism that has as its primacy the study of the social totality, in which race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are understood as partial totalities of this totality.