Trabalho, masculinidades e vida em acolhimento institucional para grupos de homens jovens acolhidos

Abstract

Even today, work maintains its central status in the formation of society and the constitution of subjects. However, in recent decades, there has been a deskilling of workers with precarious working conditions, intensified by the pandemic context, particularly affecting young people. Work is still being seen as an important attribute of male identity and, as a human activity, it also becomes an axis in the application of the protective measure of institutional care. Thus, from the perspective of Social Psychology and, based on the qualitative research approach, this study aims to identify and analyze the conceptions about work and masculinities and the relationships between work, masculinities and life in institutional care for young men in care. To develop the research, focus group interviews were carried out with 11 young men hosted in services in two large territories in the city of São Paulo. The interviews were analyzed from the perspective of Content Analysis. The results show the conceptions of work associated with the idea of responsibility, placed mainly on men; permeated by elements that mark the context of precarious work: management of one's own survival, meritocracy, informality, exposure to risk, menial jobs, in contrast to young people's expectations regarding formal, protected work that enables social mobility. Furthermore, the speech points to work as a performative element of masculinity, associated with the ideas of the sexual division of labor and denounces how men's bodies are entangled with the productive logic of capitalism. The conceptions about being a man correspond to the representation of hegemonic masculinity, in which attributes such as strength, aggressiveness, authority and the erasure of any signs of femininity are valued, indicating an inseparability between being a man and being a worker. The results also show the ambivalences of life in foster care that permeate work experiences that, at times, allow young people to guarantee their right to professionalization, but which also generate anguish and uncertainty regarding their professional future; and the experiences of being a man, giving them the opportunity to review their lives, to return to living with proportional responsibility, at the same time that they live the social stigmas of institutionalized life and update the brutal reality they live, marked by poverty and due to the need to “get by”. Finally, the research also made it possible to explore how trans bodies go through the experience of being a man and life in institutional care. The results point to the need to build and strengthen programs and public policies that consider the singularities of institutionalized young people regarding their professional future and that break with the discourses of meritocracy, considering the challenges and material conditions that these young people encounter in exercising their citizenship.