Subject, Collective Action and Mobilization: the hospital toy library and the right to play

Abstract

We present in this paper the hospital playroom as an instrument of preserving the right to play. From the discussions occurred in the National Playroom Workshop: the importance of the toy in health and education – realized in the Senate and organized by the Participatory Legislation Committee of the House of Representatives on August 10, 2005 – and in the light of the subject categories, collective action and mobilization, we try to unravel who the actors involved in the process that resulted in the adoption of the law 11.104/2005, as the mobilization (or not) for effecting the same. The methodology adopted in this study is the analysis of discourse understood as a means of production of meanings and constitution of subjects. In this sense, in discourse there are always disputes, power relations, besides always be unstable. We note that although the first toy libraries have been established in Brazil in the 1980s, it was only in the following decade that the national situation would provide the conditions for debate and implementation of toy library in children's hospitals in our country.