Gender, quarantine and Covid-19: for a critique of domestic work
Joana das Flores Duarte[1]
The quarantine has been among other things or place of reappearance (also forced) of the traditional role of female gender/sex. It is fact that for many of us – women – the domestic work is not an episode of the quarantine, but it – the quarantine – gives us sufficient elements to think that this work is indispensable and invisible, not that it refers to market relations. In fact, we women are (as we use our skills) experiencing domestic work intermittently.
Many women who only exercise this unpaid work, say that they are more exhausted, worried and with the feeling that they are only responsible for the virus not entering the house. Condition that is founded from the mystification between work and care in the field of work, in that both are seen as indivisíveis and of exclusively feminine character. In times of pandemic, this work becomes redoubled, because in addition to the already existing activities of storing, cleaning, being emotionally available for the family nucleus, the virus imposes a new overload, to the extent that it demands a place of care and work, to its elimination. It seems like ending up with an invisible virus is analogous to domestic work, because both seem to be unrelated. For this idea, the process of sanitizing food and household items takes half four hours a day, for women with children, this work is even more tiring.
Note-I know that the pandemic has imprinted a new rhythm of work on women who are carrying out forced confinement and as they are going to work (area of health, essential services and paid domestic work). Regarding this aspect, it is important to highlight that many of these women are working as domestic servants, as they leave their homes, to perform paid work in their employers' homes.
Knowing a little about the reality of the city of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, these women are displaced (average of 2h30 each relocation) to peripheral and poor areas of the city, in which there is a lack of decent housing (houses with an average of 20 to 40 square meters per family with an average of 5 members) basic sanitation; Among them is potable and properly channeled water, a sewage net and a collection of domestic waste. It is part of the family chefs, with children, blacks and lives in the habitations that the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) calls substandard agglomerates. Therefore, there are spaces whose characteristic is marked by the lack of intervention by the Brazilian State not regarding the guarantee of human rights and social protection. These women relocate from these communities to work in the poorest areas of the city.
Regarding this reality, the death of the last day March 17, 2020, of a 62-year-old domestic worker, in the city of Rio de Janeiro (first confirmed case of death from covid-19 in the city) is the portrait of that tragic social reality. While I was working from second to sixth (even sleeping without work) with days off at the end of the week, I was a resident of Bairro Miguel Pereira (100km away from the capital) and worked in Bairro do Leblon – whose value is the square meter of an apartment costing an average of 30 thousand reais (approximately USD 5.636,97). Idosa, hypertensive and diabetic, therefore belonging to the risk group, was ill at work, and alleged that she had to go to the hospital that was caring for the patient who returned from Italy as a virus. At the age of 62, she died without the opportunity given to her, in an employed condition, directly to secure work. This implies thinking about how the relationships between care and work are appropriate for capital, as well as how class inequality is intrinsically linked to race and gender, starting from the relationship between employees and employers. Regarding the work regime of the deceased due to Covid-19, there is no access by means of the information disclosed, but following the statistics, the possibility of informal link is not refuted.
Likewise with supplementary Lei nº 150, of June 1, 2015, which provides for the domestic work contract, in the absence of regularization and guarantee of direitos it is long to be surpassed, more than 70% of the performance of this activity is in informality and that the data of IBGE on The profile of domestic workers disclosed in 2018. Ainda second or Institute, since October 2015, when it became obligatory or recolhimento of the Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço (FGTS), as domestic workers without carteira assinada passaram from 4,2 milhões to 4,4 milhões (BRASIL, 2018).
Silvia Federici (2019), in her study on domestic work, invites us to think about this process, not in an isolated way, as something “natural” carried out by women, but rather as a strategy of accumulation and reproduction of capital in the course of history and its generational character:
«There is nothing natural about being a housewife, so much so that it only takes at least twenty years of socialization and daily training, carried out by an unpaid mother, to prepare her daughter for this role, to convince her that raising her husband is the best she can expect in life" (Federici, 2019, p. eleven).
Not by chance, the retrograde model of the big house and the style romanticized by Gilberto Freyre in contemporary houses, or female domestic work, is reproduced on a large scale. It is not possible to see women working for other women, which allows us to affirm that the sexual division of class, race and gender is everywhere. In order to be able to “open my hands on domestic work”, there must exist a model of purchase and sale to force work to take place in my place. Only the system that, at the same time as it gives a sigh of emancipation to some, imprisons and super-explores so many others.
I want to say that the quarantine has changed the last few times in the world of formal, informal, illicit and self-employed work, but it has not altered anything, absolutely nothing, or domestic work, with only one rescue: it has now tripled inside and outside the home. Our work was never visible to the capitalist system. We specify how Virgínia Woolf told us to kill or Anjo do Lar, because he is one of the two responsible for the mystification between care/affection and work. It cannot be denied, from these elements, that the deterioration of domestic work is the product of a neoliberal perspective that produces from the unequal relations between sex/gender, or discourse, to sociability, to the aesthetics of care as an exclusive expression of women, endowed with femininity, and from this point of view seeks to determine the place and the subjects in them. social relations in a hierarchical way.
Finally, there is no possibility of thinking about the political and human emancipation of women without respect to class and race dimensions in paid and unpaid domestic work. In capitalist social relations, what is interpreted as a world of precarious work, and that between a black woman working as a domestic and/or not working, the first option is “less worse”, but it is known that “less” and “worse” together are not supported from a logical point of view, so its use is also here. denied. Certainly, in terms of survival, this is a truth, but it is precisely about this appeasing logic that criticism is launched. Surviving is related to what is left over, what is left over. Therefore, demystifying domestic work as a feminine attribute implies knowing its political weight and its involvement in the political and human emancipation of all women.
References:
BRAZIL. Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Available at: https://www.ibge.gov.br/. Access in: April 2020.
DUARTE, Joana das Flores. Despossuídas do Século XXI: Women in the drug market in Brazil in the last decade (2006-2016). Post-Graduation Program in Social Services. Tese. Doctored. Available at: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/9067. Access in: April 2020.
FEDERICI, Silvia. The Zero point of the Revolution: domestic work, reproduction and feminist struggle. Translation by ColetivoSycorax – São Paulo: Elefante, 2019.
[1] Member of the Working Group on Feminisms, Resistances and Emancipation.
[+] Thinking about the pandemic
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