Emoções em tempos de crise: Experiências de internação por COVID-19

Abstract

This research presents experiences of illness and hospitalization due to covid-19. Based on the analysis of narratives of Middle-class people, in Rio de Janeiro, I investigate the meanings, ways and implications of being a person hospitalized for covid-19 during the biggest health emergency of the century. For this, I focus on routines and relations in the hospital, in order tounderstand the ways in which healing and care work operate in this epicenter of biomedical knowledge and practices. Then, I turn into the field of emoticons, delving into the ways in which fear shaped life in the pandemic in general and the period of hospitalization in particular. I also explore other feelings that they showed inside the hospital environment: embarrassment, loneliness and gratitude. I try to demonstrate the scenarios in which these feelings are created, how they are produced and what they, in turn, provoke, what are their objects, addresses and functionings. Thus, I find in emotional discourse a powerful source of analysis and problematization of social reality. I believe that looking at the experiences of suffering helps to unravel the way in which the processes of illness and healing occur in westernized societies.