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Contributions to the analysis of love between couples who live on the street[1]
Contributos à análise do
amor entre casais que vivem na rua
Nádia Xavier MOREIRA *
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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7533-4636
Ana Cláudia Silva
FIGUEIREDO
**
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8974-0483
Abstract: This article aims to address the loving
relationships – affective and sexual ones – among the homeless, understanding
such relations as an event – culturally significant instances in a given context. The present study is grounded on the
theoretical constructions of Marshall Sahlins about
this category, as well as on the studies focused on the analysis of how bonds
and emotions are combined and inscribed in the social field. From participant
observation and analysis of bibliographic productions, we sought to understand
how these loving relationships are experienced. The results of the study
indicate that love on (of) the street is an event as the street is reinvented.
Before being a place of suffering, it is a space for the private, for
experiencing intimacy, for building bonds and loving relationships. In their
daily lives, homeless people go through this experience according to their way
of life, within their field of possibilities, in general, these encounters are
inscribed as stories of possible loves.
Keywords: Homeless. Affective and sexual
bonds. Event.
Resumo: Este artigo tem como
objetivo abordar os relacionamentos amorosos – afetivos e sexuais – entre
moradores de rua, entendendo tais vínculos como um evento – acontecimento
culturalmente significativo em determinado contexto. O presente estudo
ancora-se nas construções teóricas de Marshall Sahlins
acerca desta categoria, bem como nos estudos voltados à análise de como
vínculos e emoções se conjugam e se inscrevem no campo social. A partir da
observação participante e da análise das produções bibliográficas buscou-se
entender como esses relacionamentos amorosos são vivenciados. Os resultados do
estudo indicam que o amor na (de) rua se constitui em um evento na medida em
que a rua é reinventada. Antes de ser um local de sofrimento, a rua é o espaço
do privado, de vivência da intimidade, de construção de vínculos e relações
amorosas. Moradores de rua em seu cotidiano vivenciam tal experiência de acordo
com o seu modo de vida, dentro do seu campo de possibilidades, em geral esses
encontros amorosos se inscrevem como histórias de amores possíveis.
Palavras-chave: População em situação
de rua. Vínculos afetivos e sexuais. Evento.
Submitted on: 6/11/2020. Revised on: 17/1/2023. Accepted on: 5/3/2023.
Introduction
|
I |
ntimate
and loving relationships between homeless people are common among those who
inhabit this space and they follow the same patterns of marital relationships,
except for the lack of housing and an acceptable space for the exercise of
intimacy.
“Gina[2]
is my love, I go through anything with her, I'm hungry and
cold on the street. We have plans, maybe we’ll get married one day [...]. We eat
and drink what we have. I like to see her smile when we wake up, she is the
best part of my life. I’ll only leave the streets if it’s with her.” Elias
reported during a social assistance approach, whose objective was to remove
them – he and his partner – from the street. However, the only possible form of
reception, at the time, was to shelter them in
different places, something unthinkable for them. We made a point of writing
down the used argument in their file, given its grounds and origin, even though
we knew that the host institutions did not recognize the request made as
legitimate. Now, Adriana and Alexon, both homeless people as well, as described
in an article by G1 (GIANTOMASO, 2020), met on the street, but established more
intimate relationships in a shelter, adapted for temporary accommodation, in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in this social segment.
Adriana reported that, after a week at the shelter,
Alexon decided to leave the place: "I couldn't let the love of my life go
away!", admits Adriana. From then on, they began to live together as a
couple.
The testimonies indicate that, subverting expectations and projections
around this environment, the street can also mean, for those who survive in it,
a locus for building networks of affection and not just a space of pain, isolation and loneliness. Therefore, the street, the
physical and social space where these subjects' bodies are located, is also a
place for the construction and reconstruction of values, ways of life, survival
strategies, friendship bonds and also possible love
stories.
What both accounts (by Gina and Elias; Adriana and Alexon) reveal to us
is that, as the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
(1987) argues, “[…] the use of conventional concepts in empirical contexts
subjects cultural meanings to practical reassessments” (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 174).
For, “[…] nothing can guarantee that intelligent and motivated subjects, with
diverse interests and social biographies, will use the existing categories in prescribed ways” (SAHLINS, 1987, p.
181). The creative actions of historical subjects imply the reassessment of
meanings in practice, historically altering cultural schemes in the world or in
the action: “Cultural meanings, overloaded by the world, are thus altered”
(SAHLINS, 1987, p. 174). Therefore, culture is not something stable. It is
always an intersection.
Starting from the argument in defense of the
inseparability of cultural reproduction and transformation, Sahlins
suggests the concept of structure of the conjuncture, fundamental to the
understanding of cultural change. This concept is associated with the way in
which cultures react to an event, allowing the immediate context to dialogue
with previous structures. In the author's definition (SAHLINS, 1987), an event
consists of the “[…] practical realization of cultural categories in a specific
historical context, as well as expressed in the motivated actions of historical
agents, which includes the microsociology of their interactions” (SAHLINS,
1987, p. 15). Further on, he complements (SAHLINS, 1987): “[…] a set of
historical relationships that, while reproducing cultural categories, give them
new values taken from the pragmatic context” (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 160). The
structure of the conjuncture, as it is a concept inserted between the event and
the structure, can be considered a mediating notion between synchrony and
diachrony.
This article, in dialogue with such reference, has as its main objective
to approach, through bibliographical productions and participant observation,
the affective and sexual relationships of people who have the street as a
permanent living space[3], an urban characteristic that rises to the condition of an event – a
culturally significant occurrence in a given context,
placed to pressure the structure of the conjuncture. For this purpose, we
borrow Marshall Sahlins' theoretical constructions
about this category, as well as studies aimed at analyzing how bonds and emotions combine and are inscribed
in the social field. (LE BRETON,
2009; PAUGAM, 2008, 2019; REZENDE; COELHO, 2010).
The problem of the homeless population has been a theme addressed in
several areas of knowledge and widely studied in the field of Social Sciences
from different historical, structural and cultural
perspectives. For the compression of this social category in contemporary
times, different authors were mobilized: ARAÚJO, 2008; BURSZTYN, 2008; ESCOREL,
1999, 2008; CEFAÏ, 2013; FREHSE, 2013; BRAGA; SOUSA, 2019; HONORATE; OLIVEIRA, 2020;
NUNES; MACHADO, 2022; SPOSATI, 2009.
However, the focus of theoretical production has still focused on analyzing this phenomenon from the perspective of poverty, exclusion and its resulting
vulnerabilities. There is still a shortage of studies and research on the topic
of emotions in the lives of homeless people[4].
It must be considered, in this regard, that the social
images projected around the street do not recognize it as a space of affection.
In the wake of the classic opposition house versus
street, within Da Matta’s
proposal (DAMATTA, 2012), the house would be the place of privacy and intimacy,
and the street, the space of anonymity and disorder. Contributing to this
debate, the historian Robert Pechman (2009),
understands that, since the 17th century, the street has been thematized by
disorder, vice and danger: “[…] it is from there that the threat promises to
corrode the society, with the plague, the epidemics, the diseases, the dirt, the
miasma, [...], prostitution, sexuality, begging, incivility, violence, revolt,
insurrection and... the revolution” (PECHMAN, 2009, p. 353). We understand,
therefore, that love on (of) the street subverts, in some way, such
projections.
The choice for such an object of investigation is directly related to
our professional trajectory of 18 years of experience in the field of social
assistance in a large Brazilian metropolis, intervening directly in the issues
of families and individuals in situations of vulnerability and violation of
rights, as well as through our practice in higher education, working with the
theme of social exclusion and the place of emotions and feelings associated
with those who survive this situation.
Along this route, we noticed in the narratives of co-workers familiarized
with the theme, as well as through participant observation, in various moments
of dialogue with homeless people, the little, or even non-existent, social
perception that among homeless people couples form, united by loving, affective
and sexual bonds.
We defend the relevance of this issue, after all, affective-sexual
relationships play a central role for human beings, composing the fundamental
threads of the social fabric. Individuals who are living on
the streets, although stigmatized and excluded from fundamental aspects
of society, as people, are not exempt from expressing feelings. Therefore, even
if disregarded, emotions constitute an important place in the lives of these
subjects and affective-sexual relationships (dating, marriage, fling or any other definition), on the other hand, following
the idealization around love, are incorporated into their way of life,
nurturing their dreams and possible projects[5].
We understand that the approach prioritized by this study, focusing on
the affective-sexual relationships of couples living on the
streets, can contribute to new perspectives on the issue, deepening and
complexifying the understanding of the phenomenon, thus providing elements so
that one can understand and treat this problem from other perspectives. It
impacts the work, therefore, on the creation of consistent public policies,
programs, projects and actions aimed at this segment, as well as on the improvement of
professional performance strategies in this area.
1 Homeless population in Brazil: contextualizing the debate
The issues raised by this study are closely related to the pauperization
process, the intensification of inequalities and the consequent social
exclusion, historically experienced by segments of Brazilian society. This
process came about, above all, from the transformations of social relations: from
seigneur-slave to bourgeois-capitalist, in the
context of the country's urbanization (VALLADARES, 1991). Since then, it has
been possible to observe that poverty in Brazil has a color,
given that it is mostly composed of black men, women
and children, who, even after the abolition of slavery, were not fully
incorporated into the dynamics of the emergent – industrial and capitalist – society[6].
According to Telles (2001), Brazilian poverty
subsisted on the fringes of the labor market, in the
underworld of the informal economy, in the confines of the rural world and
oligarchic heritage, that is, in
what presided over the country's entry into the capitalist world. For the
author, our poverty was never formulated on the horizon of citizenship. The
homeless population is, unquestionably, the most acute expression of this pauperization
process of Brazilian society[7].
The Brazilian State, especially in Article 6 of the Federal Constitution
of 1988, guarantees the social right to housing[8]
for all citizens, however we know that this is still a
far-reaching issue. For, as Gueiros (1991) teaches
us, “[…] the legal status is not a guarantee of the exercise of rights. The
forces that suffice for the inclusion of law at the
legal level are not always sufficient to force its implementation” (GUEIROS,
1991, p. 54). When we look closely at the large
Brazilian metropolises, we notice that the phenomenon of the homeless
population has a varied profile – people from different age groups – and it has
been increasingly expressed in terms of exclusion and isolation.
It is worth noting that Brazil does not have official data on this
population segment, which negatively implies the implementation of public
policies aimed at tackling the issue. The Demographic
Census of 2010 and the ongoing Census of 2022 include only the domiciled
population in their count.
Thus, the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), since 2015,
has based its estimate on the homeless population in Brazil using official data
reported by 1,924 city halls. The last technical note from IPEA (NATALINO, 2022)
analyzed the evolution in the number of homeless population between 2012 and 2022 based on a theoretical
model that considers variables of demographic growth, centrality and urban
dynamism, social vulnerability, equipment and social assistance services aimed at street population, as well as the number of homeless
people registered in the Unified Registry. For 2022, the Institute estimated
that there will be 281,472 homeless people in Brazil.
This comparative study by IPEA (NATALINO, 2022) shows that between 2012
and 2022 there was an increase of more than 300% in this populational segment,
especially in the Southeast Region (53.75%), following the same scale as in
previous surveys. Between 2020 and 2021, the explosion of this phenomenon is
due to the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on the increase of vulnerabilities
and poverty, which resulted in an increase in the number of people living on the streets. As the most vulnerable segment of the
population, for not being able to meet the standards of hygiene, protection and
isolation recommended by health organizations, the homeless population is
configured in this context as a complex issue, both from the point of view of public
policies, and as an object of scientific studies and research.
Furthermore, taking as a reference the census carried out in the city of
Rio de Janeiro in 2020, by the Municipal Institute of Urbanism Pereira Passos and by the Municipal Secretariat of Social
Assistance, in partnership with the Municipal Secretariat of Health, 7,272
people were living in conditions of extreme social vulnerability in the
metropolis of Rio de Janeiro[9]. Regarding the profile, it is highlighted that: the majority are male
(80.7%), between 18 and 49 years old (65.7%) and with low education (Elementary
School – 67%). The concentration takes place mostly in the central region
(31.9%), an area that houses the historical and economic centers
of the city. According to the data, 62.8% declare they perform some activity to
earn income. Among the main activities identified are the collection of
recyclable materials or garbage (47.5%) and the informal sale of products on the
street (26%). Around 3,289 respondents reported using at
least 1 type of drug, with 797 cases of crack usage and 1,169 of cocaine. The
condition of extreme social vulnerability was further accentuated with the
Covid-19 pandemic. Approximately 750 people indicated that they had taken to
the streets after the pandemic began and the main reasons were home and job
loss.
Despite this reality, it must be considered that the implementation of
the National Social Assistance Policy (PNAS) in 2004 (BRASIL, 2005) represented
an important advance in the field of social assistance for this segment, as it
assured this population of specialized care services.
The PNAS (BRASIL, 2005) reordered the assistance policy in the country,
raising it to the status of a public policy within the scope of the Social
Security System, fostering material conditions for the creation and
implementation of the SUAS (Unified Social Assistance System) as a
decentralized, participatory and non-contributory system
which aims to ensure social protection for individuals and families by offering
social assistance actions, services, programs and projects. Social protection
under the SUAS is organized by levels of complexity into Basic and Special
Social Protection. The theme of the homeless population is a complex demand,
whose reference is the services of medium and high complexity offered in the
spaces of the Specialized Reference Centers for
Social Assistance, the Specialized Reference Centers
for the Homeless Population and the Accommodation
Units, which by their nature must carry out active search actions, social
approach, care / follow-up and institutional reception.
We also have the approval of Federal Decree No. 7.053, in 2009, which
instituted the National Policy for the Homeless Population and its Intersectoral
Follow-up and Monitoring Committee, another important regulatory framework. One
of the relevant points raised by the decree is in relation to the definition of
the homeless population, understood as follows:
Art. 1 The
National Policy for the Homeless Population is instituted, to be implemented in
accordance with the principles, guidelines and objectives set forth in this
Decree.
Single paragraph. For the purposes
of this Decree, the homeless population is considered to be the heterogeneous
population group that has in common extreme poverty, interrupted or weakened
family ties and the lack of regular conventional housing, and that uses public
spaces and degraded areas as space for housing and support, temporarily or
permanently, as well as accommodation units for temporary overnight stays or
temporary housing (BRASIL, 2009a, no page number, emphasis added).
In the light of the decree, this segment in Brazil would be formed, as
suggested by Bursztyn (2008), by the “[…] unnecessary,
[...], the nomads, excluded and survivors [...]” (BURSZTYN, 2008, p. 139) or
merely lúmpen, who survive on handouts, public or
private charity and odd jobs and informal activities. They are still, in the
definition of Escorel (2008, p. 139), “[…] characters
and scenarios of the social drama, naturalized and trivialized in their misery
and isolation who live in the streets without being able to settle down and
exposed to their own fate”. It is configured, in this sense, among the most
challenging issues of contemporary poverty and one of the greatest expressions
of social exclusion.
Castel (1997), when addressing the issue of social exclusion, discusses
a set of deprivations related to instability or expulsion from the labor market, relational insertion, weaknesses in
protective supports or social isolation. For the author, there is a mode of
existence of a certain number of groups or individuals rejected from the common circuit of social relations, are the indigent, the dropouts, with no
fixed address, that is, the disaffiliated, individuals who no longer
belong, who are no longer linked to the universe of work and/or to broader
social networks. For Castel (2000), disaffiliation is the category that
manifests itself with the greatest impact on the individual's life, given the
rupture it promotes in relation to the hegemonic social reproduction norms, changing
the forms of sociability, impacting on the social references of housing, family , friends and other forms of identity and social
insertion of the subject.
Paugam et al. (2003),
deepening the debate, understands that poverty, in addition to a state of material
shortages, is a specific and inferior social status, which implies processes of
loss of references (desocialization) and social disqualification. He
understands that this is “[…] a dynamic process that has multiple dimensions,
in addition to the economic and social issue, it permeates the identity of the
subjects and the perception they have about their own situation and their
relationship with others” (PAUGAM et al., 2003, p. 47).
Dialoguing with these authors, Escorel (1999)
considers the phenomenon of the homeless population beyond the extreme
dimension of poverty, misery and exclusion. Thus, it
considers the personal aspect of the individual, deprived of family, direction,
income and place in the world, whose survival routine is marked not only by the
search for places, support networks and identity, but, notably, through a
trajectory marked by fears, absences and prejudices.
After all, living on the street imposes on subjects a condition of
invisibility, anonymity and breaking with socially expected patterns of habits
and customs, many of which are associated with the process of forming civilized
men (ELIAS, 2011) – such as having meals sitting at a
table, using a fork, knife and napkin, sleeping in a bed, taking a shower,
having sex in a private space, performing physiological needs in suitable
places[10]. In this sense, survival in the context of the street imposes the
suspension of notions of shame, hygiene and the very idea of individuality, a
central component of modernity.
Despite this difficult situation, the homeless population, contradictorily,
through their practical actions, also gives a new meaning to being in this
place. Because living in this space requires creativity and adaptations to face
this reality. We defend the argument that such an urban happening rises to the
status of an event, as the street is reinvented as a private space, for
experiencing intimacy, for building bonds and loving relationships.
2 Sahlins' contributions to the concept of
event
The fundamental axis of Sahlins' reflections
in his work Islands of History (1987)
is built on the relationship between history, structure, event
and cultural dynamics. For this author, “[…] history is culturally ordered in
different ways [...]. The reverse is also true: cultural schemes are
historically ordered because, to a greater or lesser extent, meanings are
reassessed when realized in practice.” (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 7).
In this sense, culture is historically both reproduced and altered in
action. For, if, on the one hand, people give meaning to objects and organize
their projects based on pre-notions of a cultural order; on the other hand, the
creative actions of historical subjects imply the reassessment of meanings in
practice, historically modifying cultural schemes. To the extent that meanings
are subjected to empirical risks, the symbolic is pragmatic and the system is
the synthesis of reproduction and variation.
For the author, the structure – symbolic relations of a cultural order –
is actually a historical object: “[…] the problem now
is to explode the concept of history through the anthropological experience of
culture. The consequences [...] are not one-sided; [...] a historical
experience will explode the anthropological concept of culture – including the
structure” (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 19). The structure is realized both in convention
and in action. Thus, if the relationships between categories change, the
structure is also transformed. For Sahlins , culture – for being a historical object, therefore,
arbitrary – would function as a synthesis of stability and change, of past and
present, of diachrony and synchrony. Therefore, culture is not something
stable. It is always an intersection.
In order to
show that history and structure do not exclude themselves mutually, Sahlins analyzed the impacts of the
arrival to the Hawaiian Islands of James Cook, captain of the English Royal
Navy, during the 18th century:
Upon arriving in 1779, Cook was initially greeted as a
god come down to earth, specifically as Lono, one of
the greatest gods in the Hawaiian pantheon. When, a few months later, Cook set sail but was unexpectedly forced back into port,
the mood of the Hawaiians changed dramatically and Cook was killed in a fight
over a boat. (SCHWARTZMAN, 1984, p. 272).
For the author, Cook's experience proved that the world is not obliged
to follow the logic by which it is conceived. According to Sahlins,
from the event of Captain Cook's
return, the natives orchestrated it in their own way, with their historicity,
giving it meaning according to their cultural categories: “[…] different
cultures, different historicities” (SAHLINS, 1987, p.
21). It is also evident that the transformation of a culture is also a way of
its reproduction. We can see in such an analysis a classic example of the
author's theory about the relationship between structure and event:
Each in their own way, the leaders
and the people reacted to the foreigner according to their self-conceptions and
their usual interests. Traditional cultural forms embraced the extraordinary
event and recreated the given distinctions of status, with the effect of
reproducing culture as it was constituted. The specific conditions of European
contact gave rise to forms of opposition between leadership and common people
that were not foreseen in traditional relations. In the world or technically in
action, in acts of reference - cultural categories acquire new functional
values (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 174).
In this way, an event, as shown by Sahlins,
does not constitute in just one happening of the phenomenon, but what is given
as an interpretation, and acquires historical significance only when
appropriated by the cultural scheme.
3 When love
enters the street scene: affective and sexual relationships of couples
living on the streets
as an event
According to Sahlins (1987; 2004), an event is
implanted in the human domain through culturally established values. Considering
that our interest and investment in the past do not consist of a simple desire
to understand what was done and conceived before us. For the author, between
the facts and us, there is a context and a system that mediates what we
understand as an event, being "[…] culture precisely the organization of
the current situation in terms of the past" (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 193).
In historiographical practice, disturbances to a given normative flow
are those commonly raised to the level of events. Specific beings, objects or
acts are totaled according to the context in which
they occur. They are therefore able to affect the order of a given system.
Conversely, according to the context of a system's relations, categories and
hierarchies are particularized into specific people, places, objects
or acts.
The event unfolds
simultaneously on two planes: as an individual action and as a collective
representation; how the relationship between certain life stories and a story
above and beyond these others; the event is a single update of a general
phenomenon; we have, on the one hand, the historical
contingency and the particularities of individual action and on the other,
those recurrent dimensions of the event, where we can recognize a certain
cultural order (SAHLINS, 1987, p. 143-144).
From this perspective, we can think of love on (of) the street as an
event, in the proportion in which it reveals itself, beyond its individual and
collective dimension, but, above all, in the symbolic dimension. Thus,
translating into an update in the way of living and inhabiting this space, thus
breaking with a perspective of a unique history of pain and suffering for those
who live on the street, representing a shift in the
way of performing the experience and space of the exercise of loving experience.
In the end,
If we go through the history of painting, from the
18th century onwards, if we go into 19th century literature, if we go into 20th
century cinema and if we take a peek at 21st century advertising, we will see how the street
will be thematized by the bias of disorder, [ ...] place of rowdy. [...]. Rua will always remember the rabble, living without a roof,
the absence of family, the lack of ties, exclusion. (PECHMAN, 2009, p. 263).
Ensuring survival in such an inhospitable environment requires the
subjects, who permanently live in that place, to know how to manage it,
establishing links with networks of solidarity and mutual care. It becomes
relevant in this aspect to know the public services available, with emphasis on
health and social assistance, support organizations for bathing, feeding, among
others.
It is important to highlight in this last issue that the homeless
population carries with it a trajectory of breaking work ties and the ideal of citizenship. Furthermore,
their bonds of affiliation and kinship, for the most part, are frayed or
even broken. Isolation and loneliness are words commonly evoked to describe the situation of these
subjects. For Escorel (1995), the main
characteristic of isolation is impotence and inability to act.
I cannot act
because there is no one to act with me. [...] isolation becomes unbearable when
the isolated man is ‘of nobody's interest’. And then isolation becomes loneliness.
Loneliness means the experience of not belonging to the world, which is one of
the most radical and desperate experiences that man can have (ESCOREL, 1995, p.
9).
However, as understood by Paugam (2019), establishing bonds is part of human
existence, assuring men and women protection against
the risks of everyday life and recognition of their existence and identity.
This assertion is strongly expressed in the survival strategies of the homeless
population.
Living
on the street is not guaranteed with isolation
practices and without exchanges, it is necessary to weave networks of
solidarity. Those who fall on the street cannot live alone. To be accepted, ‘you
cannot be a parasite’, and this includes sharing from asking passers-by for
money or food, performing small services such as cleaning the street, taking
care of the garbage of a commercial establishment, doing small favors for merchants or street vendors, among others (KUNZ;
HECKERT; CARVALHO, 2014, p. 927).
Therefore, individuals, even if they go through processes of rupture,
have the need and the ability to establish new bonds, built by bonds of love,
friendship, solidarity, affinity or by participating in the same way of life, that is, by sharing a form of social organization with strategies, use of
space and establishment of relationships connected to livelihood (PAUGAM,
2019).
It is through the way of living on the street,
with its particular rules and codes of conduct, that the population living in
that place, through creative actions, move encounters and resulting affections,
building and rebuilding bonds, which can unfold in a specific type:
affective-marital relationships.
In this perspective, if the event ‘is a difference that makes a
difference’, the existence of couples who experience love on the street imposes
disturbances on a given normative flow – more than a simple irruption of an
urban event, typical of everyday life in the fabric of the city –, implying the
possibility of reassessing the meanings and categories associated with the
ideas of isolation, loneliness and absence of ties, historically attributed
around living permanently on the street. Thus, the ways of conceiving ‘living’
in that place and ‘being’ in that place are widened.
However, it is necessary to consider that an event does not exist
without the symbolic system: “[…] it is that the definition of a
'something-happened', as an event, as well as its specific historical
consequences, has to depend on the structure in force” (SAHLINS
, 2004, p. 322). Happenings only become events when they are projected
as something significant with historical effects, housed in the culture in
question, whose way of welcoming is never the only possible one, since the
event is an interpretation of something that happened, and interpretations
vary. In the words of Sahlins (2004, p. 372): “Cultural
orders are event-systems, since they reproduce themselves through a world of
which they themselves are not producers”.
From this perspective, as already discussed in this study, when we look
back, we do so within a cultural logic in which we are inserted. Sahlins departs from the conception that people use
cultural orders to shape their construction and action in the world. When they
act, people bring their constructs into play, using them to refer to the world.
For, The eye that sees is the organ of tradition
(BOAS, 1986.
Anchoring ourselves in such contributions, we can affirm that the
perceptions that circulate in greater numbers in society around conjugality do
not recognize as a couple two people living on the streets
who live in an affective-sexual relationship. This fact is reflected in the
design of public policies.
In the specific case of the city of Rio de Janeiro, there are no public accomodation services in the couple modality. The rooms are
collective and the lodgings are organized by gender
and age group. For this reason, many couples do not adhere to shelter and remain sleeping together in the street[11]. The denial of the legitimacy of these relationships also appears in
the content of the municipal public ombudsman, a service designed to respond to
complaints, requests and complaints from citizens of
Rio de Janeiro[12]. Among the complaints regarding the
homeless population, through this channel, those recorded by the presence
of couples sleeping together and having sex on the street can be found. Such
facts also allow us to glimpse the stigma (GOFFMAN, 1988) around these subjects[13].
We emphasize that, although the non-recognition of these relationships
prevails, there are initiatives, coming from civil society organizations, such
as the National Movement of the Homeless Population and the National Movement
of Homeless Couples, which claim the guarantee of the rights of homeless couples
as a family. Returning to Sahlins' contributions, we
can think of such movements as those with the potential to not only incorporate
a systemic order, but to transform it through acts-mediations that represent
the dispositions of an entire group. The acts of socio-historical individuals
are transformed into icons of concepts that interact with the social structure.
The individual
is a social being, but we must never forget that he is an individual social
being, with a biography that is not identical to anyone else's. He is someone
who 'we must pay attention to'. This is because, [...] if there is a 'me' who
embodies the attitude of some group at some level of
generality, there is also an 'I' that preserves a potential freedom to react to
the 'generalized other' (SAHLINS, 2004, p. 309).
We understand that in the “[…] social imaginary, the idea of the couple
is evoked as a pair associated by affective and sexual ties on a stable basis,
with a strong commitment to reciprocal support, with the aim of forming a new
family including, if possible, children” (FÉRES-CARNEIRO, T.; DINIZ NETO, 2010,
p. 270). In other words, a conception of conjugality thought from the reality of the average strata
of society, whose project and the idea of a couple are well defined from a way
of life typical of this segment, in which common goals of children, acquisition
of goods and preservation of individuality are present. This social repertoire
is still closely linked to the ideal of romantic love and marriage.
According to Giddens (1993), the appreciation of affection and eroticism
as the basis of the marital relationship, as well as the ideology of romantic
love, are inventions that are supporters of bourgeois ideology, from the 18th
century onwards, when sexuality starts to occupy a central role within of
marriage. During the 19th century, romantic love made passion love a set of beliefs
and love began to be projected onto the idealization of the other, assuming a
dreamy and unrealistic character.
And it is the categories associated with the paradigm of romantic love
that homeless couples come to question. Finding themselves linked to this
perception of love, the ideals of beauty and cleanliness, of experiencing
intimacy privately, away from the public eye. By not fitting into this pattern
of love relationship evoked in greater numbers in the social imagination, such
couples, through their practical actions, live this experience within the
possibilities presented by their way of life.
However, as Sahlins demonstrates, the world is
not obliged to reproduce itself as thought by traditional categories, as
cultural meanings change based on new functional values attributed to
categories, either through changes in the world or through acts of reference . By transforming the relationships between
categories, the structure ends up being transformed as well: “[...] culture
functions as a synthesis of stability and change, of past and present”
(SAHLINS, 1987, p. 180).
In the course of
events, when interpreting the past, men and women rethink their categories,
subjecting them to empirical, everyday risks. In this perspective, the original
meaning of cultural categories is remodeled by the
introduction of new meanings, new symbols, leading to changes in society's way
of thinking and acting.
We argue that these couples experience possible stories and loves,
permeated by a multiplicity of emotions and feelings, as highlighted by
Goldenberg (2001) using Simone de Beauvoir (1980) as a reference in the famous
work The second sex. Between a man
and a woman there are many possibilities for affective relationships, such as:
love, friendship, sexual pleasure, complicity, camaraderie, trust
and tenderness. Each couple within their field of possibilities finds an ideal
form for their relationships. The author's elaborations are quite appropriate
to situate and legitimize relationships between couples in any situation.
Final considerations
Taking our professional trajectory as a starting point, as social
workers in a large Brazilian metropolis and in the exercise of higher
education, we seek to analyze the phenomenon of love
on the (de)street as an event, as proposed by Sahlins . The interlocution
with the author's thought and with other references from the sociological and
anthropological fields allowed the development of the central idea of this
study: love, lived on the street, a space historically
associated with “[…] conflict, confusion, disorder; something of the quality of
the external, the public, the mundane [...]; something of the popular,
plebeian, vulgar order” (PECHMAN, 2009, p. 356). Thus
constituting a significant cultural event, an event, since it subverts
traditional cultural categories under which love is thought, linked, notably,
to the ideal of romantic love.
We understand that, even though people living on the
streets are not alien to such projections around love, the street does
not offer any conditions for the ritual of this experience, given, taking especially
into account the lack of space reserved for intimacy, much less for proper hygiene.
We argue, therefore, that homeless couples live the affective-sexual experience
according to their way of life, within a field of possibilities, thus enjoying
history and possible loves.
Love on (of) the street therefore becomes an event, as the street is
reinvented as a space for the private, for experiencing intimacy, for building
bonds and loving relationships. And, continuous act, a place of exercise of
sexuality and eroticism, experienced, now, under the indiscreet and
disapproving eyes of society. It is evident, therefore, that “[…] the world is
not obliged to obey the logic by which it is conceived” (SAHLINS, 1987, p.
174).
In light of
the references that substantiate the professional ethical-political project of
Brazilian social work, social workers must be able to investigate, welcome and
forward the demands of the dyad, offering different perspectives on this social
phenomenon. It is, therefore, a matter of examining the street not only as a
space for production relations, but also for the production
of relations (PORTELLA,
1995). In this way, the possibilities of understanding and political
engagement in the defense and expansion of the rights
of the homeless population increase.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nádia Xavier MOREIRA Worked on the conception,
design, analysis, and interpretation of data, writing the article and critical
review.
Post-doctorate in Social Anthropology at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro (Museu Nacional da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). PhD in
Social Work from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade
Federal do Rio de Janeiro). PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Brasília (Universidade
de Brasília). Senior Officer of the Brazilian
Navy (Frigate Captain). Professor at
the Superior School of Defence (Escola Superior da Defesa).
Ana
Cláudia Silva FIGUEIREDO Worked
on the conception, design, analysis, and interpretation of data, on writing the
article and on the critical review.
Graduate Social Worker from
the Federal University of Maranhão (Universidade Federal do Maranhão). Postgraduate (Master of Social Service) from the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro). A member of the technical staff as a statutory servant
of the Prefecture of Rio de Janeiro since 2004. Professional with extensive
experience and specific knowledge in the implementation and management of Social
Assistance Policy, and the Reception and Assistance Policy for children and
adolescents, with a focus on the violation of rights (child labour, domestic and sexual violence). Currently provides technical assistance to the office
of the Municipal Secretariat of Social Assistance of the City of Rio de Janeiro
and develops research on the Homeless Population.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
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