Salud Menstrual: un análisis interseccional de los discursos producidos durante la pandemia de covid-19 en Brasil

Abstract

Given the complex context of period poverty, people who menstruate throughout Brazil's territory find themselves without the minimum conditions of access and care for menstrual health. Since the field of sexual rights and reproductive rights is surrounded by tensions in the political scenario, we ask ourselves about the discourses that are produced in Brazil on menstrual health, how this reverberates in public policies and impacts the experiences of people who menstruate in the country during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The methodological path begins with the search for official documents published by the Diário Oficial da União in Brazil (DOU) on the subject of menstrual health, with a date range between 02/26/2020 and 06/15/2021; systematization in tables of excluded and included documents; search for publications on the Scielo portal, based on the selected descriptors; survey of mobilizations around the theme based on news from online newspapers, in the defined period. As a result, we found that despite national and international considerations dealing with the importance of combating period poverty, the Brazilian government affirms a position of neglect in relation to menstrual health, following an agenda of violation of sexual and reproductive rights that becomes more evident in the pandemic period in the country. On the other hand, we analyzed the productions of feminist theorists about menstruation, in addition to the social mobilizations that were consolidated in the struggle to guarantee the right to menstrual health in this period. This concludes the importance of an intersectional analysis in the construction of public policies in a country that is historically structured in coloniality, reproducing gender, race, class and territory inequalities to non-normative bodies. The plurality of voices of people who face menstrual experiences is essential in the fight against period poverty, as well as the role of the opposition in the political scenario for the realization of rights.