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Caio Fernando Abreu. AIDS. Educational practices. Self-care.
This dissertation aims to analyze educational practices focused on self-care in the writings of Caio Fernando Abreu about AIDS in the last decades of the twentieth century. The study uses letters and chronicles written by the author from Rio Grande do Sul as historical sources, here considered sensitive documents, analyzed from the perspective of the philosopher Michel Foucault (2008). Through "Discourse Analysis," we understand how discourse organizes what is accepted as truth or logic among the statements, thus seeking to understand how writing operated as a device for self confession and the production of subjectivities in the face of vulnerability and illness. Based on the domains of Cultural History and the categories of sensibilities, educational practices, self-care, and modes of address from authors such as Sandra Pesavento (2003), Jorge Larrosa (1994), Michel Foucault (1977), and Elizabeth Ellsworth (2001), this research problematizes the stigmas associated with the HIV-positive body and highlights the discursive strategies of resistance and affirmation of life present in the author's texts. The results indicate that Caio Fernando Abreu's writings functioned as pedagogical practices capable of educating for care, denaturalizing moralizing discourses, and offering new meanings to existence amidst the imminence of death.