Tempos que duram, lutas que não acabam: o cotidiano de Leonor e sua ética de combate

Abstract

In this thesis, I describe the quotidian of Leonor, departing from the friendship we developed during the research. Living in a popular occupation in Rio de Janeiro city centre, Leonor showed me several problems that enlarge the field of understanding poverty, precarity and violences. The thesis is divided in three parts. In the first, I privileged the memories of pain and suffering that inhabit Leonor’s ordinary life through complex wefts that make past experiences embedded in the present. In the second, I work the ethics of care developed by Leonor to take care of her aged and ill mother, as well as the duration and the effects of this task in her body and subjectivity. I describe the ethics of “taking care” in relation with a set of issues: the precarity of housing; the territory dominated by drug traffickers; and the health institutions. These two first parts have the complex family relations as conducting wire. In the third part, I discuss the infrastructural precarity of housing, in which the access to drinkable water and electrical network are not granted. In middle of a tangle of conflictuous relationship, involving neighbours, traffickers, State agents, I analyse a promise from the State to refurbish the occupied building, as well as the suspension of the project. This thesis tries to describe the meanings of being a woman living her life in ordinary exception.