Your envy is not my progress: Welfare through cultured and gendered approaches

The article points out the importance of considering cultural and gender aspects in the understanding of mental health, as well as in the conceptions about well-being and illness that people have. From discourse analysis of a group of women from a populated center located in the South of Peru, we analyzed the contents that give these notions from the cultural diversity and gender focus. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, participants report three models of femininity: "mother-wife", "working woman" and "independent woman-the other". Welfare is presented as a tension between the "mother-wife" and "working-woman" femininities, including social aspects that impact this tension. On the other hand, we examined the main diseases recognized by the population, being the "harm" the most feared and associated with envy women. The discussion focuses on the understanding of "harm" as a metaphor of social imagery and envy as an intra-gender social disease that prevents alliance between women.