Situating affect in Brazilian female domestic labour

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe present article locates affect in the ambivalent power relations of paid female domestic labour, by tracing the ways in which affects articulate social and employment status. As several feminist scholars in Brazil have shown, feelings in the domestic working sphere are oriented toward the family and friendship. In my reading, these studies foreground that expressing such affection facilitates the inclusion of a ‘strange’ woman in the household, enables domestic workers to ask for support in difficult moments, but at the same time creates an emotional surrounding, in which both hierarchy and inequality are felt more intensely. In accentuating these ambivalent power relations, I also situate affect historically, following Gunew’s call for ‘decolonizing affect theory’. In order to do so, I discuss feelings of affection within the domestic working sphere in studies from Europe and bring them into dialogue with sociological and anthropological studies from Brazil. Finally, this article directs these efforts to a queer reading of the domestic working sphere and indicates disidentification and transversality as concepts to go beyond institutionalized feeling, distinction and hierarchy.