Não Existe Mãe-Geladeira Uma análise feminista da construção do ativismo de mães de autistas no Brasil (1940-2019)

Abstract

The present doctoral thesis has the main objective to historicize, from a feminist perspective, the collective actions and advocacy carried out by mothers of children diagnosed with autism in Brazil during the 1980s to 2010. To this end, we go back to the 1940’s until 1970’s, aiming to understand the construction of autism/maternity relationship used in the scientific discourses and also in the Brazilian printed newspapers. Our central time frame, 1980-2019, considered the emergence of the first associations of autistic mothers and fathers and the approval of the Berenice Piana Law (law number 12.764, of December 27, 2012), which is considered by autism advocates to be milestone in the history of autistic citizenship. Thus, we verified how the aspects of this law were understood by the interviewed mothers. In this sense, the thesis defended here is that the dissemination of autism in the media, especially from print newspapers – as well in the academic field –, only happens in large scale in Brazil from the late 1980’s onwards, being fundamental the collective actions and advocacy of mothers of autistic. These mothers both wanted to understand the meaning of the phenomenon and also to pressure the state to ensure, through public policies, to guarantee social rights to their children. While articulating a determined struggle for the conquest of the citizenship for the autistic, the women have re-signified their identities as mothers and shifted their places and roles within the family. This identity was elaborated from the refusal to the guilt regime in which they were inserted (mother-refrigerator), to the elaboration of another form of exercise of maternity: the activist mother.