Trabalho, Sociologia Clínica e Ação: alternativas à individualização do sofrimento

Individualization of Responsibility for Health and Entrepreneurship of the Self as Neoliberal Strategies of Bodily Subjectivation and Contemporary Life Management

“…The rst concerns the regularity that indicates the summative/quanti able logic of the movements, and the second refers to the imperative character oriented to the individual behavioral dimension. These aspects draw attention because they seem to be linked to the device of "individualization" (Braz, 2021) as an operator of a speci c mode of people management and bodily subjectivation. This is shown by the mobilization of discursive resources that value the quanti cation of movements that must be continuously performed and, in a way, accounted for and monitored by the subjects for the improvement of health and well-being.…”

“…The discussions proposed by Braz (2021) regarding individualization are focused on the conditions of healthdisease and suffering experienced by different subjects in the dimension of work. It starts from the conception of work under an expanded perspective in relation to its reduction to employability and wage earning, since work is related to praxis, actions oriented to the act of creation and/or action, and not to mere productivity aimed at generating and accumulating pro t (Enriquez, 2014).…”

“…We observe that such utterances strategically act in the bodily subjectivation by activating devices that operate investments of the order of entrepreneurial neoliberal rationality in behaviors that seek to be stimulated by the guidelines in question. Even if the discourse subjects are not necessarily positioned in this order, conscious and/or intentionally, utterances of this and in this rationality express a concern to health and body education professionals because they tend to increase the suffering of subjects in the search for health maintenance as they trigger the individualization device and, with it, operate, subjectively and discursively, key concepts such as those mentioned above (Braz, 2021; Seligmann-Silva, 2013). Thus, such utterances centralize in the subjects the responsibility for the conditions of their states of health-disease.…”

“…Based on this consideration of the author, we interpret that, in individualistic and behaviorist interventions, marked by the assistentialist model, the performance and success in the adoption and maintenance of prescribed habits prevail over meeting the needs of the people. This condition is rooted in today's predominant managerialist ideology (Braz, 2021), in which advances in technological and economic investments prevail over the confrontation of undigni ed and unequal conditions of access to fundamental rights to life and human existence. Therefore, we consider it important for popular health actions and interventions to raise awareness about the scenario and the mechanisms and devices described and exempli ed in this article, especially to raise awareness about the elements that constitute entrepreneurial neoliberal rationality and offer possible forms of resistance to its advance and strategies, from educational and/or pedagogical perspective.…”