Brazilian nursing: a reflection about political activity

Abstract

This text is a reflection about the political participation of Brazilian nurses through the ideas of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In his book, In Search of Politics, the author questions the neoliberalism as the cause of the global political inertia that makes individuals stop believing in the fight for a better world. Thus, when reflecting on the political unpreparedness of the nursing category it is questioned the reasons to the passiveness and atony toward the experienced conflicts. The nursing professionals produce an invisible and immaterial work, built under the biomedical model, centered in the social and technical division of work, which contributes to explain the loss of legitimacy that hits political actions from these professionals. Why does the category lack strength to change this reality? Aiming to establish the proximity of Bauman's analysis with nursingfield, we articulated the profession historical configuration and aimed to identify some of the determinants of its political participation, permeated by progresses and relapses.