Relatos de Homo e Heterossexuais Femininos Acerca do Comportamento de Cuidar de Parentes

Abstract

The objective of this work was to investigate and to compare the statements of women’s declared homo and heterosexual, with and without children, concerning cares favored to relatives. Looking to understand the differences among those caretakers in relation to the attention favored to relatives, and to explain those differences taking in consideration the presuppositions of the altruism by complementary relationship to the social and psychological explanations. Have been participated in the study 16 women: four that pronounced Exclusive Homosexuals, four that pronounced Homosexuals with Children, four that pronounced Heterosexual without Children and four that pronounced Heterosexual with Children. Those participants were selected among 83 women with ages between 18 and 60 years. The study was divided in two phases and two instruments were used: a self-applicable questionnaire, elaborated for to present research, that consisted of ten questions, and an interview itinerary semi-structured, that was built starting from reading references of instruments of collection of data and from the objectives proposed for the research. The same consisted of 15 questions regarding personal cares and financiers favored to relatives. The informations of the questionnaire were collected at the bars and the night clubs specialized in gay, lesbian and sympathetic (GLS) customers, also at places frequented by the public in general. The information of the interview were collected at the room number two at the UFPA Psychology Laboratory, as well at the office and the residences of the respondents. The results of the questionnaire were as follows: Of the 19 respondents of the group of Exclusive Homosexuals, 52,6% have declared the sustenance just from theirs own income (OI), representing the largest group that presented the number of respondents with OI. It was observed although, this group was declared to be living a stable relationship now - 73,7%. The duration of those relationships varied from one month to five years. In the group of Homosexuals with Children was only possible to find nine respondents during the whole collection, which was equal distributed between 18 and 60 years of age. That seems to indicate that Homosexuals with Children are in fact less frequent in the investigated population, although there is a possibility that they don’t have the interest to participate into the research for personal reasons. The group with larger number of respondents was the Heterosexual without Children, presenting a great concentration in the interval of age between 18 and 28 years. The results of the interviews demonstrated that the behavior of taking care of the relatives as financial and personally appeared more times in the group of Exclusive Homosexuals than in the other three groups. It could be observed that, in relation to financial cares, siblings, cousins and parents were more mentioned, and, in the group of the Heterosexual, the nephews, cousins, uncles, parents and grandparents. In relation to personal cares, siblings and grandparents appear more in the groups homosexuals, and, in the heterosexual, parents and grandparents were the relatives more frequently considered. Since the largest index of financial and personal cares happened in the group of Exclusive Homosexuals, there is a probability that the theory of the altruism by the relationship can be an explanation for the behavior of taking cares, because that theory says that consanguineous relatives share genes and, therefore, to take cares of those relatives would implicate to perpetuate their genes in other generations without the imperative of the reproduction. It was observed in all of the groups, however, that there was great occurrence of cares - mainly financial - concerned to siblings, nephews and cousins, what suggests that these behaviors of caretakers with relatives are typical of this species, favoring the maintenance of the caretaker’s genes in the following generations without consent of his own reproduction.