Interwined looks: homeless women living in the city of São Paulo

Author(s)

Gisele Aparecida Dias Franco Arrunátegui

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Saúde Pública (FSP/CIR)
• Defense date: 2008-07-01

Examining board members

Augusta Thereza de Alvarenga; Rubens de Camargo Ferreira Adorno; Aparecida Magali de Souza Alvarez; Maria Antonieta da Costa Vieira; Wilza Vieira Villela

• Advisor: Augusta Thereza de Alvarenga

Abstract

A growing increase of homeless people has been noticed, during the last few years, especial/y in big cities such as Sao Paulo. Yet the available scientific literatura on the theme does not stress the particularity of the feminina group of homeless, as a peculiar segment with specific needs, beyond the requirements specified by the medical speech, which prevails in the health domain. The purposes of the current work are: to understand the experience of homeless women through their personal look, as well as through the look of the Other Individual Close to Them - homeless men- and the Other Individual Far Away from Them- composed by a diversified group of people that are not homeless; to identify gender issues noticed during the speeches of the interviewee about homeless women and intersect the diferente views about them. The empirical research, of qualitativa nature, was based on depth interviews, according to specific thematic programs for each one of three respective groups: Group 1 - Homeless Women; Group 2 - The Other Individual Close to them: Homeless Men; and Group 3- The Other Individual Far Away from Them: Men and women who are not homeless. The narrativas were interpreted as significant speeches, enlightened by the Social Sciences theories, considering the gender approach. By interlacing the views of the three groups, such speeches reveal a way of life characterized by the subjects and specifications diversity where the \"Us\" and the \"Others\" are either opposed, or approached, in a particular dynamics. The street world presents itself as a world full of mannish rules where the power relations are established in different levels of social relationships amid men and women, among them, gender relationships which emphatically preserve traces of the patriarchal order still alive in the brazilian reality. (AU)