Memorials of Nursing Professors, Foucault and Adriana Varejão: Approaches in Ethical-Aesthetic Essay

Abstract

Objective: to conduct an essay ethically and aesthetically about writing academic memorials as a way of constituting full subjects in a Brazilian Nursing School. Method: this is an ethical-aesthetic essay. A theoretical-methodological framework was used from the perspective of Foucaultian studies of intertextuality, together with reproduction of works by Adriana Varejão. We also used documentary sources from 16 memorials of full professors at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Nursing School, written between 2012 and 2020. Results: writing academic memorials is a practice of constituting subjects who tell the truth about themselves. We are inspired by artistic works by Brazilian Adriana Varejão as an approximation to the field of art, already known for its possibility of creation. The teaching-care place, nurse-caregiver, nurse and professor are places of production of truth about themselves. On the other hand, other identities, such as sanitarian and anthropologist in and of health, make up the paintings. Such productions of truths about themselves, in the academic ritual of ownership, produce acts of knowledge and power in which subjects who write become what they claim to be in their testimony and, in the opening of the ocular extirpation, this image is shown and proliferated to those who approach it. Conclusion: writing works as clothes worn by such subjects, in their best sewing. In the memorials, the aim is to reinforce the place of knowing and knowing about herself and about how she became a full professor, so as not to break the situation or to operate surgically in her way of seeing.