Vergonha: um estudo em três gerações

Abstract

This thesis belongs to the ambit of the reflections that focus the relations between subjectivity and sociability. The articulation between these two plans was built from the study of the feelings, focalizing shame. This is an intrinsinc feeling of the human being that reveals the relation of man with social world. Shame, rooted in the social morality, is born, however, under the "other's"look. Shame constituías an affective mediation of the transmission process of the social world. This process was investigated in this study through relations among generations in order to recuperate the social ground without which it would not be possible to examine the repetitions and transformations of the shame feeling. The field of inter-generation relations shows itself as a fertile way to analyse lhe changes in the subjectivity. Shame was studied in three generations of the sectors considered the most modernized of the middle class, in the city of S.Paulo. Qualitative techniques were employed for the raising of data mainly based on individual evidence and on group activities. In this perspective it was possible to notice that shame takes placa, chiefly, in the intimacy sphere. Thus, the most significant changes of this feeling, and also its repetitions, are observed in the dominions of body and sexuality. In the intimate ambit, this feeling, on the one hand, recovers the frontier of "I", but on the olhar hand, reveals its failures and imperfections. In the mediation between the public and the private, shame emerges as the affective dimension of the values relativa to subalternity and does not control the typical relations which are of public sphere