Aesthetics of friendship during the COVID-19 pandemic: An exploratory analytic study

During the covid-19 pandemic, the social and health crisis - which already configured the reality of the Brazilian population - worsened and deepened their precarious life conditions. This study seeks to analyze the conditions of possibility for nurses to establish their care practices in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, articulating with some issues brought up by the ethics of care. To this end, inspired by Michel Foucault's genealogical method, as well as supported by Feminist and Gender Studies, we approach the power relations in their interface with the role of nursing in contemporary society. We then take the reports that 59 Primary Health Care nurses gave to a national survey entitled Nursing Practices in the Context of Primary Health Care: A National Study of Mixed Methods, which investigated the overload and precariousness of the work of nurses in Primary Health Care, during the covid-19 pandemic, to articulate with a brief genealogy of health care. Thus, we reflect about care practices from a perspective situated by gender and race issues, as a way of knowing, creating and recreating care practices ethically oriented by an aesthetic of friendship, as Foucault suggested in his studies on care of the self for practices of freedom.