In recent years, women's search to reorganize their affection networks, prioritize friendships, and build communities has gained strength as a response to job precarization, the invisible burden of care, and a growing epidemic of loneliness.The invisible burden of careAnd there's a growing epidemic of loneliness.
Gonçalves' analysis points to a historical contradiction: although women have recently won important public rights, such as education and paid work, there has been no social or state counterpart that divides the responsibility for household work and caring for children and the elderly. "Even after gloriously winning the right to paid work, the right to education, the right to have careers, they still bear this burden. It's very old. It has been called double oppression, double shift. They realized this was inappropriate, because in reality, there is no double, no triple: you have multiple layers of exhaustion," she reports.BdF Interview.
She highlights the need to question societal norms and structures that perpetuate these inequalities, and to promote a more equitable distribution of care work.
Gonçalves emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing unpaid care work, traditionally performed mostly by women, and advocating for policies that support and remunerate this essential labor.
She concludes by urging for a transformation in how society perceives and values care work, moving towards a more inclusive and equitable distribution of responsibilities.To say it's machism."What is structural is invisible. We call it social DNA," she assesses.
For the sociologist, the solution to this civilizational crisis is not in conservative speeches that try to idealize a non-existent past, but rather in recognizing that isolation is an illusion. "We need each other, period, and the larger and more competent and structured the networks, the better for all people," she argues. "We cannot think of our lives as individual entities. The individual is a fiction."
As a possible path, Gonçalves advocates that "the answers are in our capacities to create ways of life, to recreate things and conditions of emancipation for men and women, for young and old, and this has to be an insistence, it has to be on our horizon, we cannot neglect it," she summarizes.
Check out the full interview:
To listen and watch
TheBdF InterviewIt airs from Monday to Friday at 4 p.m. onRadio Brazil of Fact98.9 FM in Greater São Paulo.