Confissões deslocadas: textualidades sobre o trabalho doméstico

Abstract

This thesis is part of the discussion on paid domestic work in Brazil. It is intended to study the textualities that evoke women and/or female characters who live in/through domestic work. In this sense, it seeks to demonstrate that in Brazil, due to its history of colonization, it is no longer possible to discuss society without considering the power relations and impositions practiced by the colonizers. With this in mind, it is highlighted that work for low-income women - especially racialized women - is not related to the struggle for libertarianism and choices, as it was pursued by European women, on the contrary, work represents the subsistence of the worker and her family. In general terms, this thesis intends to discuss, through decolonial feminism, the fact that paid domestic work is beyond the feminist debate on the sexual division of labor, since, without a doubt, its dynamics are not only remnants of the slave system, but also updates of colonial relations in the country. Therefore, the analysis is made in a dialogued way between the reports, literary fictions and other textualities that will help to understand the fragmentation of oppressions experienced by domestic workers. The corpus consists of the fictional narratives Água de Barrela (2016) and Solitária (2022), by Eliana Alves Cruz and the accounts present in the book Eu, a empregada doméstica: porque o quartinho da empregada é a senzala moderna (2019) by PretaRara, as well as other texts that talk to the universe of domestic work. Such works present as their theme the maid and the work done by them, from the work exercised by enslaved women in the big houses to the work carried out by the maids in middleclass houses today, such a context, helps us to visualize, among many conditions and representations, the importance of not defending just a single feminism. Thus, one of the strategies is not only to analyze the modes of invisibilization and oppression experienced in the workplace, given that workers are subjected to helplessness and forms of depoliticization of the domestic sphere, but also to identify the elaboration of skills to resignify the relations of coloniality, built during the period of colonization, as well as the forms of contemporary resistance in the dialogue between decoloniality and labor justice.