Narrative research with drug-using women:

a feminist ethnographic experience

Abstract

This is a narrative research, inserted in the feminist epistemological field, that sought to know the life trajectory of women who use crack. A multi-sited ethnographic research was carried out, which started from listening to drug-using women who took part in a public mental health service to, then, following two of them through the spaces in which they lived, namely, shelter, school, health center, in addition to their own homes. The narrative interview technique was used as data collection method. The act of listening to the women allowed us to disarticulate fixed meanings and challenge the guiding intelligibility of care practices to people who use drugs. The limitations that the condition of user of a mental health service establishes to the enunciation of a valid knowledge of the women about themselves stood out, as their narratives are a product of the discourse created about them by the health field, which institutes and prescribes their own materialization as drug users.