A Memory Essay: Reflections on the Production of Care and Knowledge in Encounters on the Street-Home

Abstract

Our objective is to discuss the production of care and knowledge in encounters that put corporeality and affectivity in the foreground. In the context of a health service aimed at the homeless population, the encounter with violated lives, especially those of black women, questions us and forces us to write in ways that allow for overflow. Thus, the memorial narrative constitutes a tool that has an epistemological, ethical, and political function, which allows us to reflect upon the present, alliances, struggles, and the insistence of life, even where they seem unlikely to exist. We present a theoretical essay that places these lives in dialogue with black and intersectional feminism and the work of Conceição Evaristo so that we can rethink our approach to lives on the streets, whether to produce care or knowledge. By bringing the story of a woman who lives in a street home in this essay, we emphasize the importance of intersectionality when constructing analysis or caring relations that defy the hierarchical and individualistic structures linked to the colonialist patriarchy that affects urban territory, public policies and forms of appropriation and intelligibility of spaces and lives.