Emotions, Gender and Moralities: Modes of Suffering Chronic Migraine Headache in Buenos Aires, Argentina

This text explores and analyses the relationship between pain, emotions, gender and moralities from chronic headaches classified as migraine. According to the narratives of patients who suffer them, there are states of feelings associated with loss of emotional control that are expressed and take on physical reality in the body in the form of migraine headaches, which vary with gender and the local contexts in which they are produced. The fieldwork was done in a public hospital in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) where people with this type of headache were interviewed. Through an analysis of the narratives, the ruptures that generate migraines become visible towards normalized patterns in suffering chronic pain, as well as people’s sufferings and strategies for dealing with the dual nature of these afflictions as physical and emotional experiences that are crossed and mediated by moralities and gender.