Men and public policies: Between the public and the private

Visibilities and invisibilization

Abstract

The subject of public policies for men in Brasil starts to get attention between the 1960s and 1970s of the twetieth century, in view of the need to deal with the fact that, at the same time that men held greater power than women, they had disadvantages in relation to them in terms of morbidity and mortality rates. In this context, this article presents a review based on the Scoping Review method, on public policies aimed at men in the period 2010-2020. To do so, we started with the following question:  how does academic scientific production relate “men” to public policies intended for them? Discursive Textual Analysis was used for the process of understanding  the collected material. This is a self-organized process in which new understandings emerge from a sequence of three components: deconstruction of  the corpus texts – unitarization; establishment of relationships between unitary elements – categorization; apprehension of the emergent in which the new understanding is communicated and validated. In this process, two categories emerged from the results: The Public and The Private in Public Policies and Men and Public Policies: Visibilities and Invisibilities. These findings expose the complexity of the issue. The discourses, which are inserted in the symbolic plan, instituted through different rituals that naturalyze the structure of power and domination, dictate and delimit spaces of circulation and performance for women and also for men. These men trapped in gender roles, question little about the social constructions around their masculinity, exercising it with full visibility.