The Politics of Clinic and Critique in Southern Brazil

Bibliographic Data

ID2353162
AuthorsDominque P Behague (0000-0001-8621-6942, Vanderbilt University and King’s College London, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume39
Issue6
Pages43-61
Publication date2022-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheory Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/02632764221076430
PMID36246428
OpenAlexW4220734949
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited57

Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil's post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people's lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick's analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault's biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people's theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem's concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars' work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden 'storm-and-stress' adolescent. Young people's subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life

Biopower · Conversation · Deconstruction (building · Elite · Epistemology · Flourishing · Hermeneutics · Mainstream · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Reductionism · Relation (database · Sociology · Subject (documents · Child Welfare and Adoption · Children's Rights and Participation · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, Genetics, and Society · Social Psychology

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