Moralidade, vergonha e doença: a carreira moral de homens e mulheres alcoólatras

• Autor(a) principal: Alzuguir, Fernanda de Carvalho Vecchi
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/4814
• topic: Moral career; Gender; Alcoholism; Shame; Carreira moral; Gênero; Alcoolismo; Vergonha; Homem - Condições morais; Mulher - Condições morais; CNPQ::CIENCIAS DA SAUDE::SAUDE COLETIVA

The study examines the moral career of alcoholic men and women and its impact on the construction of gender differences and similarities. For this purpose, fieldwork was conducted, consisting of semi-structured interviews with 20 patients ten men and ten women who were either hospitalized or outpatients , of a public health service in the city of Rio de Janeiro, being treated for alcoholism, as well as daily observation of this service. The concept of moral career (GOFFMAN, 1996) expresses the fundamental aspect of the path taken by the institutional treatment towards the construction of an alcoholic identity, and the inclusion of alcoholism as a disease. The analysis finds that alcoholism is constituted by interconnections between physical and moral plans. Whereas the first plan designates the construction of the notion of alcoholism as a disease characterized by loss of control of the will to drink, the moral plan comprises the relational and social-cultural dimensions within which alcoholism is built. The moral of shame is the part of privileged access to the moral dimension of alcoholism, which in fact encompasses and structures its medicalization. Shame is valued as a positive feeling that denotes the maintenance of responsibility towards the social demoralization caused by the use of liquor. The physicalization resulting from the moral career favors the embedding of the concepts of alcoholism-disease and alcoholic-identity, while obscuring the moral aspects that conduct the construction of alcoholism. Thus, the informants with long-time insertion in the institutions dedicated to the fight against alcoholism often have greater ownership of those notions, if compared to those with shorter route. While the moral plan illuminates the socio-cultural complexity of alcoholism, physicalization standardizes social differences amidst alcoholics. This issue is reflected on the interviewees personal opinions about the lack of differentiation between alcoholic men and women. Nonetheless, when evaluating society s judgment on both, the gender difference is refunded by the consideration that women are more stigmatized than men. It was observed that the drama of alcoholic women favors the tension between alcohol consumption and matters of privacy, like the difficulty of simultaneously accommodating motherhood and such consumption. More evidently, the drama of alcoholic men expresses the conflict between alcohol consumption and suitability to a male profile associated with the ethics of the male provider.