Approaches between genre, madness and Michel Foucault

a literature review

Abstract

The work is a literature review on the way gender, madness and Michel Foucault are discussed. The survey was carried out in the SciELo database, considering the words 'gender', 'madness' and 'Michel Foucault' as indexers anywhere in the text, from 2017 to 2021. The generating hypotheses of the research were ideas collected in preliminary readings that gender can be used to understand power relations; that women were disqualified in relation to men; and that madness was used to pathologize women who had attitudes outside the cultural standards of society. Thus, approaching female madness helps to reveal the relationships of power and knowledge, relationships that help in the constructions that are unfavorable to women. The result of the survey of SciELo productions was that gender issues are dealt with, in most cases, by female writers, and demonstrate the quest to reduce the inequalities perpetrated by socio-historical-cultural discourses.