Capacidades reprodutivas de mulheres com malformação congênita do aparelho reprodutor: Uma leitura difrativa à luz do realismo agencial de Karen Barad

Abstract

Introduction: Biomedical and sociological investigative efforts have proposed analysis on female infertility whose limitations have contributed to the perpetuation of essentialist understandings about bodies and their properties. Goals: The study aims to show how the modality of new materialism proposed by the North American physicist and feminist Karen Barad, named agential realism, and the analytical method of diffractive reading systematized by the author allow us to build alternative understandings about female infertility, pointing out ways to overcome the shortcomings that are present both in biomedical and sociological approaches on the subject. Methods: The research mobilizes a qualitative methodological approach of multiple case study, using semi-structured interviews with three women diagnosed as infertile due to Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MRKH). We conduct the analytical procedure of diffractive reading, in order to read the experiences of the participants through some of the ontological positions derived by Karen Barad from Niels Bohr's theorizations about quantum mechanics. Results: From the diffractive reading of the experiences of the three participants through the light of the Baradian theoretical propositions, an alternative understanding of the reproductive capabilities of women with MRKH emerges, which identifies these bodily attributes as ontologically relational and constantly changing socio-material phenomena, whose technological, political, economic, and social complexity makes any kind of biological essentialism unsustainable. Conclusions: Barad's agential realism and her method of diffractive reading invite us to resist the temptation to attribute to bodies characteristics and capabilities that are constant, universal, and independent from the material-discursive contexts and apparatuses that produce them, appearing as promising theoretical and methodological tools for qualitative investigative efforts that, starting from the social sciences, focus on the topics of reproductive health, the body, and its properties.