The risk of seeing suffering and reproducing inequality

The aim of the broader research agenda of which this paper is a part of, is to capture the negotiations, narratives and emic meanings produced by the homeless inhabitants of downtown Brasília, Brazil, regarding state and private provisions of benefits and services. The purpose is to understand the risks of not having demands met, beyond waning governmental resources, but also the strategies to affirm homeless lives in such encounters of demand and supply. In pursuing this broad objective, the research stumbled with risk management practices that revealed the importance of emotions in the encounters of the homeless with service and benefit providers. Using ethnographic methods to partially connect (Haraway, Donna J. 1995. “Saberes Localizados: A Questão da Ciência Para o Feminismo e o Privilégio da Perspectiva Parcial.” Cadernos Pagu 5: 7–41. https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cadpagu/article/view/1773/1828) to this world, the research entered a ‘moral economy of sharing’ (Bourgois, Philippe, and Jeff Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press) with around 40 participants, by working with an NGO of harm reduction for 9 months, that specializes in homeless women and sex workers. This economy entails the sensibility of noticing to whom, what and when to share, translate and exchange emotions, world views and objects-services, so that the connection therein established can effectively create an alternative to the caritative logic that dominates Brazilian relations of social protection, embedded in more than 500 years of catholic colonialism and racial subalternity, with its inbuilt mechanisms of perpetuating inequality (Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge). Instead, the research results reveal that the harm reduction NGO works on the thin layer between homeless agency and necessity, freedom and moral rules, escaping the caritative emotional trap.