Entre sombras e lampejos: narrativas de trabalhadoras domésticas

Abstract

Paid domestic work in Brazil is marked by invisibility and clandestinity, its origins in the periodof the Brazilian slavery regime, continuing to reverberate around this category of work until the most recent period in our history. The research consists of analyzing the impacts of paid domestic work on the lives of women who do it and how they recognize themselves as a work category. To this end, we analyzed the dynamics of domestic work in Brazil through voices linked to social activism and in the second stage of the research, voices far from this scenario, through oral narratives of domestic workers inserted in the cultural context of the city of Picuí, located from the interior of Paraíba, where we carried out an analysis covering ethnic distinctions. The dynamics of class, gender and ethnicity are essential to carry out the analysis of this category of work, given the social characters who carry out the profession. In view of this, we use the intersectional approach DAVIS (2016), and permeate the nuances of subordination and resistance of workers, through their narratives, so that we can understand the facets of domestic work in Brazil and in the city of Picuí, as well as the meanings attributed by the workers in the work context in which they were inserted. Our main methodological contributions are the testimonies of cyberactivism on the page I, a domestic worker, the documentaries Domestic work: Building equality in Brazil and Domestic workers and also oral reports, where we rely on authors such as BOSI (1994) and THOMPSON (2002). The research showed in the macro and micro analysis and in the ethnic context that the workers are exposed to similar labor situations, however it pointed out different positions of the workers in the macro scenario, whose narratives were taken from a militant context, from the other workers. In the second phase of the research, when we enter into an ethnic analysis within the context of Picuí, the workers' narratives are mostly similar in relation to their work situation and the stance adopted by them as a labor category.