Viver Cuidar Esperar: um experimento de escrita etnográfica sobre cuidado, gênero e geração

Abstract

This article experiments with a genre of writing, the flash ethnography, to present the story of a woman who, affected by a rare disease, lives an unexpected loss of her corporal movements. Esperança’s illness, as I call her fictionally, disrupts a network of care that she led for many years, in which she moved between different generations. The significant disorder lived by this woman entails a series of family negotiations that lead to a reflection on the erasure of the essential reproduction sphere in the capitalist system. Flash ethnography, as defined by Nomi Stone and Carole McGranahan, constitutes a path of ethnographic writing that dispenses the existence of a broader research project. The textual genre entails compressed narratives, closed by themselves, however, equally fruits of a lively intersubjective encounter with otherness. In this vein, the manuscript that I present has the form of a short tale, also inspired by autoethnography, which sees literary discursivity as a legitimate means of narration when the researcher and the person researched coincide. In my case, there is no such correspondence, but a degree of proximity to the facts that mobilize the narration.