1 - Domestic Work, Gender, Race, Class and the Ethical Paradox of the Big House in Brazilian Cinema

Summary

In the foreword to the Brazilian edition of her book A Decolonial Feminism, published during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Françoise Vergès observes that domestic labour, like care work and cleaning jobs in general, are a corollary of colonialism and slavery. At the same time that they are necessary and indispensable for a ‘racial neoliberal capitalism’, these jobs – and thus the people who perform them, mostly racialised women – must remain invisible (2020: 17). In fact, according to Vergès, slavery has produced superfluous lives, and the paradox of the economy of the superfluous lives lies in the fact that black women are both dispensable and intrinsically necessary in capitalist societies; they are both needed and made invisible/ostracised. Vergès thus calls for a decolonial feminism that might unveil such disparities and contradictions in Western societies and contribute to the historical struggles of the underprivileged fighting for their right to exist. Race and the colonial legacy become, under Vergès's scrutiny, essential terms for the understanding of domestic work. Race and coloniality, thus, intersect with gender and class in the construction of the social position and the imagery of domestic work.

It is precisely the interwoven relationship between Brazil's colonial past and how slavery has helped shape systemic racism, ethnocentrism, sexism and classism – and has developed as informal work in modern society – that informs our reading of the figure of the housemaid in contemporary Brazilian cinema. We point out the coloniality of power embedded in the employer/housemaid relationship in modern Brazil that constitutes what we will define as the ethical paradox of the Big House: the denial of relationality, that is, the suggestion that employers and housemaids exist autonomously from each other. This denial, consequently, also encompasses the relation between coloniality and modernity as well as the intersection of gender and sexuality that constitutes the colonial/modern gender system, as proposed by María Lugones (2007; 2010). From the employer's point of view, the Big House includes practices of erasure and denies agency and subjectivity at the same time that it has naturalised submission and hierarchical relations to the point that the housemaid can be often treated as property that can be disposed of and replaced, and even sexually harassed.