Carolina ZIMMER; Nicole Silva dos SANTOS and Milene Santiago NASCIMENTO
Doxa: Rev. Bras. Psico. e Educ., Araraquara, v. 18, n. esp. 2, e023022, 2023. e-ISSN: 2594-8385
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30715/doxa.v24iesp.2.18646 9
know if you stay with the child if you... you're constantly calling, "Mom, watch
TV with me," "Mom, help me build the Lego," "Mom, it's this, Mom, it's that,"
the child, you leave, you let go, sometimes you can't even get their attention
all the time [....]
[...] It's the whole day. It's complicated. My studying was saved for when, well,
my husband and son were showered and lying in bed. So it was starting at
eight o'clock at night, and there was a day of the test, deliver it at four in the
morning on a Sunday. Because there was nothing else to do, you had to deliver
it. Some tests have a deadline, so I needed to do it. [...] At first, my husband
was at home, it was worse because he had meetings all day, and he was talking
to others all day, so he got a room for himself. In my house, there are two
floors, but how do you hold a child running, jumping, and calling the father
and opening the door in the middle of the meeting and saying hi in the middle
of the meeting [...]. Sometimes, we shout. There's a little flower essence here
that I've been taking, if you want, I can recommend it, it's great. No
contraindications.
It is relevant to highlight that in the statements, the presence of the husband emerges as
a factor that intensifies the domestic burden, often prioritized over household and childcare
responsibilities. This suggests an implicit obligation to the well-being of the husband, a pressure
to always be available for the male, meeting his desires and needs, which, at the same time,
generates feelings of resentment.
In some discourses, it was possible to observe that when there was no overload of
caregiving tasks during the pandemic, it was because the activities had been delegated to
another woman in the family (daughter, mother, or mother-in-law).
In these scenarios, the feelings experienced were of being solely responsible, due to
their gender, for the care of the home and the family. However, they also reported feelings of
"luck" due to the strong support network formed by other women, which allowed them to share
tasks and avoid the negative psychological impacts of the workload.
In this scenario, where a woman constitutes herself and perceives her existence through
the gaze of the other - whether the other is of the male or female gender, as long as it represents
the symbolic representation of the dominant category, the suitable environment for symbolic
violence to occur is created. Bourdieu (2002, p. 25) explains this issue well in the following
passage:
The practical acts of knowledge and recognition of the magic boundary
between the dominant and the dominated, triggered by the magic of symbolic
power, and by which the dominated often contribute, sometimes against their
will or even against their will, to their own domination, tacitly accepting the
imposed limits, often take the form of bodily emotions - shame, humiliation,
shyness, anxiety, guilt - or of passions and feelings - love, admiration, respect
-; emotions that are often even more painful because they sometimes betray
themselves in visible manifestations, such as blushing, stuttering, clumsiness,