Complaints of living alone: emotions, gender and aging in everyday life

Abstract

BISPO, Raphael. Complaints of living alone: emotions, gender and aging in everyday life. Rev. Estud. Fem. [online]. 2025, vol.33, n.1, e93870.  Epub Jan 01, 2025. ISSN 1806-9584.  https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9584-2025v33n193870.

The broader purpose of this article is to reflect on the experience of loneliness in its intersection with issues of gender and the course of life. We will understand being alone not as something stagnant and one-way - a “feeling of separation from the other” or “libertarian contemplation” - but as an emotional experience arising from the daily negotiations operated by the subjects about their own lives. Having the anthropology of emotions as a theoretical-methodological basis, the aim of this text is to explore the vicissitudes and ambiguities of feeling alone based on the narratives of complaints present in two life stories of cisgender, heterosexual, white women, belonging to the popular classes and today over sixty years of age. The ethnography of these trajectories reveals that the feeling of loneliness takes place from a continuum between happened and deliberate loneliness, between the pleasure of being alone and the feeling of distance from others.

Keywords : Anthropology of Emotions; Loneliness; Gender; Aging; Family.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )