Housemaids by joão v. menezes

ANTHOLOGY + FILM ORGANIZED BY VICTOR GUIMARﾃウS 1ST EDITION 2015 RECIFE, PE, BRAZIL

Texts ﾂｩ The Authors Images ﾂｩ Desvia (unless otherwise stated)

housemaids

a film by

gabriel mascaro

Seven adolescents ta of filming, for one housemaids and hand director to make a film us with an intricate we that uncover the c between intimacy, powe of the daily routine. Th a strong social comme housemaids in contem concept and

with Vanuza Santos de Oliveira, Dilma

direction Gabriel Mascaro

dos Santos Souza, Maria das Graças

production Rachel Ellis

Santos Almeida, Helena Gonçalves

editing Eduardo Serrano

Araújo, Flávia Santos Silva, Sérgio de Jesus, Lucimar Roza

housemaids

take on the mission week, their family´s over the footage to the m. The images confront eb of human emotions complex relationship er and the performance he film provides us with entary on the work of mporary Brazil. photography and sound Alana Santos

researchers and local production Carolina

Fahel, Ana Beatriz de Oliveira, Jenifer

Fernandes (Manaus), Livia de Melo (Recife),

Rodrigues Régis, Juana Souza de Castro,

Marcelo Grabowsky (Rio de Janeiro), Isabel Veiga

Luis Felipe Godinho, Perla Sachs Kindi,

(Rio de Janeiro), Marcella Sneider (São Paulo),

Valdomiro Canaleo Neto

Natalice Sales (Salvador), Tiago de Aragão (Brasilia) 5

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desvia apresenta

um filme de gabriel mascaro

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housemaids

contents introduction 16

Multiple views on a diverse film Victor Guimarães

i Housemaids, a Brazilian film

ii Questions and answers, film and domestication

Imponderable dramaturgy Fábio Andrade

Politics behind the camera Victor Guimarães

Not everything is said A conversation between Jean-Louis Comolli and Daniela Capelato

Housemaids, domestication and servilit Nicole Brenez

Resurgent class relations in Brazilian film Mariana Souto

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The obligation to ask is different from the obligation to answer Moacir dos Anjos

Domestic: An indiscreet ethnography Marco Antonio Gonçalves

iii ‘Housemaids’, a feminine noun

IV Out of shot: Unequal spaces in the house and the city

Domestic employment in Brazil: Unequal affections and the interfaces of class, race and gender Marta Rodriguez de Assis Machado and Márcia Lima She does the same thing every day: Women and domestic work Francielle Jordânia

A burdened colonial legacy: Domestic servitude in Brazilian literature and culture Sônia Roncador

102 Bodies that arrive, that stay and that leave Rossana Tavares 116

The maid’s room: A tale of unchanging apartheid in a changing domestic space Edja Trigueiro and Viviane Cunha

136 Geographies of inequality: Peruvian household workers navigate spaces of servitude Katherine Maich

Multiple views on a diverse film by Victor Guimarães Victor Guimarães is professor of Cinema and Audiovisual at the UNA university, as well as a film critic for the film magazine Cinética. He has published articles in books (Eduardo Coutinho, Cosac Naify, 2013), festival catalogues, retrospective screenings, (Hitchcock, De Palma, Rithy Panh, Jia Zhangke) and magazines (Galáxia, Devires). He has also published outside of Brazil (Imagofagía, Hambre, DocOnline, Lumière, La Furia Umana). He has been on the jury of film festivals (FICA, Fronteira), has participated in selection committees of forumdoc.bh (since 2012) and is also one of the programmers of Cineclube Comum. In addition, he was the programming coordinator of 16th Festival Internacional de Curtas de BH.

translated by victor guimarães

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When Housemaids was first shown to audiences at the Brasília Film Festival in 2012, you could immediately sense that something important was happening up on the screen. It wasn’t just the courage it took to approach such a complex world – and one of Brazilian society’s most gaping sores –, or the riskiness of the endeavor itself – handing the camera over to a bunch of teenagers whose job it was to film their housekeepers over the course of a week – but actually, and mainly, the celluloid shape all of this took in sound and images: the everyday reality of those seven homes, pieced together by provocative and precise editing, wrought with as many layers of Brazilian history as the film could deposit. The filmography of Gabriel Mascaro, whose aesthetic propositions include some of the most interesting in Brazilian cinema in recent years – films like The Beetle KFZ-1348 (co-directed with Marcelo Pedroso, 2008), High-Rise (Um Lugar ao Sol, 2009), Defiant Brasilia (Avenida Brasília Formosa, 2010) and The Adventures of Paulo Bruscky (As Aventuras de Paulo Bruscky, 2010) – seemed to have reached a whole new level, bringing to light new and at once urgent and extremely sophisticated social, political and, primarily, aesthetic considerations. The deep and heavy silence that followed a Forum.doc screening in Belo Horizonte some months later seemed the only possible response to the gravity of the themes, the intensity of the aesthetic experience just lived, and the physical certainty that what we were facing was a truly huge problem (in the most complex sense of the word). In the months that followed these sessions, the film received numerous and varied reviews. To select just two, from major dailies, we might mention Consuelo Lins, in O Globo, who wrote “we could safely say that all of Brazil is represented in this film”, or Sérgio Alpendre in Folha de São Paulo, who labeled the film “opportunistic” and dismissed it as a “glitch in the director’s otherwise interesting career”. The wide variety of critical takes on the film and the debate it provoked give a vivid

introduction

impression of the sheer range of issues Housemaids broaches: here is a film that is anything but obvious or banal; a cinematographic experience from which none can emerge unscathed. The desire to dwell patiently and carefully upon the film and the myriad of questions it raises is the driving force behind this publication. For over a year we cajoled a considerable number of authors (15 in all) to take Housemaids as a platform from which to weave reflections upon the manifold problems that pervade and constitute the film. Faced with a film this diverse, seeking a multiplicity of perspectives seemed to us the only possible way forward. If the image, in all its immanent power, can encourage new ways of seeing the world, then to offer up this film to the singular experiences of its viewers is an effort to deepen individual experiences, whilst encouraging liberty in each and every thought. In most of the essays presented here, the relationship between the analysis and the film is not direct. Terms like ‘inspired by’ and ‘based on’ are more than just substitutes for the traditional ‘on’, and make very particular sense in light of the approaches proposed by the authors. Nor is this a collection of critical reviews of the film, rather an attempt to encounter reflections that can expand our understanding and spur deeper contemplation of the world. This is a book about the sounds and images of Housemaids & housemaids. It is also about class relations in recent Brazilian cinema, about the echoes of Brazil’s colonial heritage in the architecture of middle-class apartments, about unequal fluxes in the urban environment, about the impact of newly introduced legislation regulating domestic labor in LatinAmerican societies, about gender oppression, resistance, racism and bonds of affection. Just as each person in the film provides us with the resources to imagine a world that far outstrips what we see on the screen, each text here endeavors to broaden our vision concerning the plurality of issues that arise from (and around) Housemaids. Organizing the book into sections favors a reading that begins with a close appreciation of the expressive material of the film – analyses that take the cinematographic craft as their main concern – then moves towards possible reverberations and ramifications in other spheres, other disciplines, other societies. To draw a cinematic analogy, it is as if we were starting from a close-up and zooming out slowly toward a wider panorama. In broad lines, the book begins with filmic analyses on Housemaids and its place within recent Brazilian cinema production (section 1), moves on to a second set of appreciations of the film that are permeated with links to anthropology and political philosophy and which dialogue with other cinematographies (section 2), then takes a step back in order to look at approaches that frame domestic labor in Brazil within wider historiographical, sociological and feminist perspectives (section 3), and finishes with essays that draw upon architecture, law, urbanism and a range of social and human sciences to relate other experiences at once remote from and close to those depicted in the film (section 4).

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This progressive broadening of scope suggested by the book’s organization is in-line with its general proposal. Our aim, from the outset, was to produce a field of reflection which the film buff could share with the anthropologist, the art critic with the sociologist, the architect with the lawyer. To expand a collection of essays about a film beyond strictly cinematographic concerns is to recognize that, outside the silver screen, there is a world that does not cease to exist or to transform along with the audiences sat before it; that what takes place up on the big screen does not cease to communicate with life (past or present) pulsating within each and every one of us; that a film’s work does not finish when the theater lights come on, but seeps into real life. Although this centrifugal perspective is more readily discernable when considering the group of essays, it is important to note that each text also makes an effort to look beyond the boundaries of its own discipline, exposing itself willfully to the contagion of different viewpoints. A good example is the article by Katherine Maich, which engages sociology, architecture, law and ethnography in a deep and insightful analysis of the everyday lives of trabajadoras del hogar (household workers) in Peruvian society. As such the reader should not be surprised to recognize a sociologist’s gaze in the writings of a film critic, or traces of film criticism in the writings of an anthropologist. While each essay has its own irreducible singularity, the collection forms an unlikely echo chamber in which diverse approaches and voices reverberate and fuse. In the interview with Jean-Louis Comolli and the essay by Moacir dos Anjos there is a shared concern with the cinematographic and social meaning of the acts of asking and answering. Both Marco Antônio Gonçalves and Nicole Brenez look at ‘domestication’ not as a fixed characteristic of the women (and man) portrayed, but as a mutating process, an idea that is engendered by – and varies in – the filmic material. The architectonic perspective of Edja Trigueiro and Viviane Cunha – who trace a genealogy of the so-called ‘maid’s quarters’ throughout Brazilian history – finds cinematographic echoes in Mariana Souto’s notion of the cinematic device as the architecture of a scene. We could list more and more examples, but it strikes us as more interesting to urge each reader to exercise his or her own freedom of interpretation. While a publication always runs the risk of crystallizing readings, our aim is not to close paths or present an official range of possibile experiences and thoughts about Housemaids, but rather to offer a launch pad for new questioning. To borrow from the closing line of Fábio Andrade’s essay, our main goal is to “leave them open, wide open”.

introduction

housemaids

I. housemaids, a brazilian film 21

Imponderable dramaturgy by Fábio Andrade Fábio Andrade is editor of Revista Cinética. A graduate in Journalism and Cinema from PUC-Rio, he did an extension course in Film Screenwriting at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is studying for a master’s degree in Screenwriting from Columbia University. He is a film critic, screenwriter, film editor and runs the musical project ‘Driving Music’. He has published in magazines, such as Filme Cultura, and in books and catalogues for festivals and screenings in Brazil and abroad. He has worked with the film directors Paula Gaitán, Eryk Rocha, Geraldo Sarno, Maurilio Martins, Daniel Lentini and Bruno Safadi. He won the Best Sound award at the 2013 Brasília Festival for his work on Paula Gaitán’s Exilados do Vulcão.

originally published in may 2013, as an expansion of an article originally published in september 2012. original article translated by anthony doyle. expansion translated by fábio andrade.

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When I wrote about Gabriel Mascaro’s 2010 short The Adventures of Paulo Bruscky, one of the notes left out of the final draft reflected on the similarity of the approaches shared by Gabriel Mascaro and another director from Recife, Marcelo Pedroso. Paulo Bruscky took a few of the intentions of Pedroso’s Pacific (2009) a step further; whilst Pacific was a movie with ‘no shooting’ and ‘no filming’, Mascaro’s short film, made entirely with images taken from the online social platform Second Life, was a movie with ‘no camera’, ‘no material’ (and the reason for the quotes is that of course all those things do exist in the movie, but not in the way they normally do, in other movies). Naturally, there are similarities shared by other stock footage documentaries (Pacific) or animated movies (Paulo Bruscky), but both were moved by a less material intent – one could say, leaning towards immateriality – that concerns the creative possibilities of letting go of complete control. While the best documentaries are usually open to the influence of the imponderable, both Pacific and Paulo Bruscky sought after new modulations of this lack of control. At a time when such imponderability already seemed to be caged by very strict standards coming from television, visual arts and documentary filmmaking itself, such restlessness was praiseworthy in itself. But, beyond that, it was also a shot in the right direction: the lack of control brought to light a new opportunity for drama. Housemaids is a new footstep on that same path. Seven teenagers are invited to make a documentary about their domestic home help. Mascaro does not actively participate in any of the filming, but rather directs, proceeding as the creator of the concept and the curator and editor of the material – both human and audiovisual. The first decisive choice is in the deliberate selection of the guest filmmakers: the teenagers behind the camera are all in a very specific age group, at a point in life when the nature of the relationships of command is not clearly defined. In the opening of the

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movie, some of them say that their housemaids have been working in their houses for 16, 17 years, and they are definitely not much older than that. Housemaids settles itself into a grey area in which the film’s ‘narrators’ no longer see their maids as figures of relative authority over them (like nannies) but – to paraphrase one of the characters in the movie – are still yet to ‘affirm themselves as bosses’. In each of the cases shown, the narrators are somewhat faltering, sometimes using the camera as an affirmative tool, whilst at other times using it as a medium to express curiosity. The class relation on screen is very much like the relationship between documentarian and character. But focusing on the source of enunciation of Housemaids is seeing only part of the picture. If the director’s interest in class shown in his previous documentaries Um Lugar ao Sol (High-Rise, 2009) and Avenida Brasília Formosa (Defiant Brasilia, 2010) joined the univocal nature of their titles, in a panel-like impression, the first big surprise with Doméstica (Housemaids) is precisely the way in which the film takes such a clearly delimited sample and enlarges it from the inside-out. Housemaids is, indeed, a character-driven film. At a time in which Brazilian documentary seems largely dominated by movies which are supposedly dedicated to their protagonists, sometimes carrying their names as a title in a way that is often misleading (Is João Moreira Salles’ Santiago a precise representation of Santiago, the person?), it is the movie with the most generic title that seems the most dedicated to enhancing the individuality of each character (even when, in Lena’s case, this individuality translates as near absence on screen) and fine tuning each individual piece to serve that purpose. Housemaids starts as a melodrama, but from one segment to another it may suddenly turn into an ethnographic film, a tragicomedy, a Bildungsroman, an exploitation movie. For that reason, both the film’s structure and the spectator’s fruition is often anchored in dramatic conventions derived from genre filmmaking, which requires a critical approach that isn’t based solely on the relation between documentarian and the filmed subject, despite it being part of the movie. Housemaids is not merely the documentation of a clash between two different gazes, but of three. One of the crucial shots is during Bia’s presentation: when filming herself introducing her part, she places the camera in front of a mirror that – in between her occasional head movements – reflects the image of the camera. The camera is not a sole mediator, but also the artifact that symbolizes the presence of this third element in every scene: the director’s gaze. In the class war seen in Housemaids, Gabriel Mascaro is the true authority figure, the true boss – and in that sense the movie finds an unlikely connection with the aforementioned Santiago by João Moreira Salles, also a movie about a ‘housemaid’ (a butler), but guided by an extremely personal will that’s on the opposite side of this route towards immateriality that we see here. If the spectator may notice how Lena remains mostly off-screen in her segment – and how her space in the

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scene is often occupied by her boss – it is never clear if that option was made by the one holding the camera or if it’s a posterior interpretation by the director, materialized in the editing. For all we know, there might be many shots featuring Lena in the source material, and the choice to present that relationship in that manner could be a deliberate choice made in the editing room to work against that same material. Either way, what matters here is that this very imprecise, indefinable choice remains extremely present and active throughout the film. Housemaids requires a double, maybe triple interpretational movement (if we consider the spectator’s gaze as well) that forwards this authority position, like a Chinese whispers game, which means that the final image reaching the spectator has already been reprocessed, reimagined, redirected in a number of different stages before it reaches the screen. That pattern can also be noticed in the film structure. Starting with a highly typified character from the housemaid ranks – Vanuza, a lovelorn woman who draws a certain comfort from popular call-in radio shows – the film gradually rolls out its theme with each new character, in the most unlikely ways, bringing in new faces, settings and actions that shift further and further from the stereotypical introduction. Approaching housemaids in this way, Gabriel Mascaro creates much more than a panorama of types, rather, a collection of small portraits that neither complement nor cancel each other out: these people exist only on-screen and are deliberately presented in a way that makes them seem more complex than one could possibly imagine. Gracinha, Flávia, Vanuza, Lena – each of the characters in Housemaids is carefully tailored to very specific places and relationships, precisely so that they can stand up and declare themselves unique. This constant articulation creates individual story arches for each of them: Flávia dancing to her mistress’s son is the same person who got kicked in the stomach by a past boyfriend, leading to a miscarriage of triplets (a very similar operation to the one seen in Agnés Varda’s Kung Fu Master, in which, during the eclosion of the HIV virus, a grown woman falls deeply in love with a little boy); Sérgio’s dismantling face contrasts with a picture of a much fleshier past; the boss that needs to affirm herself over Lucimar is the same young girl holding her hand in a happy picture taken years before. This appropriation of fictional tools to the realm of documentary filmmaking raises an ethical awareness that is as old as cinema itself. However, the key here is not to put that simply under suspicion, but to acknowledge this same problem before asking different questions: What does the director want with all of that? If there is an intrinsic violence in turning people into characters, what can be gained from it? Perhaps a fairer understanding of the term ‘housemaids’, of the names given to each entity, and of the ideological underlining of such terminology that the movie needs to make use of is required, to then reevaluate it. Despite the effort of treating each character as an individual, respecting their origins (“If you want me to, I can tell you about how I ended

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up in São Paulo,” says Dilma, directing her director) and their possible fate, all of them are indeed housemaids. They all share the activity that the original title carries in its singular form, because the focus here is not to affirm how plural this universe is, but to start with the plurality to investigate the ontology of the term that binds them together. Housemaids is a movie of many different games, but they all seem to lead to the broader play between part and whole, of how each new fold changes the way we perceive the original pattern of the fabric. Through their uniqueness, these characters slam up against the structures by which they are determined, transforming their bodily presence while leaving that structure slightly dented by their impact. All the characters in the movie both define and are defined by the term that brings them together, both in the film and out in the real world. For this to occur, Gabriel Mascaro has to resist the anthropological urge this kind of material inevitably teases, and face the delicate challenge of using it as dramatic material. This is achieved through both the individual blocks (as is the case with the housemaid with nocturnal habits, announced right at the beginning of her block and allowed to unfold like a thriller) and the order among and connections between them. While Pacific was put together in a way that resembled a choir, using a vertovian approach to orchestrate a plurality of perspectives in a single ship, Housemaids is carried by a single voice that changes over time. In addition to the care that ensures that all characters have room to breathe in their own spaces, the organization imposed by the director (and his editor) is based around a desire to make this general space – the synthetic, singular (in Portuguese) title, which not only speaks of a job, but also of a relationship and so many other things – reorganize itself internally. With each new character, the key turns and turns and turns, as if the restraining will towards a definition were attempting to lock a door that refuses to stay closed. It is precisely in that sense that Housemaids is a political film – the political act of questioning the names given to things. Gabriel Mascaro’s cinema has always edged in that direction, but occasionally seemed to mistake it for a chance at pamphleteering. In Housemaids, however, there is a simple perception that overrides that: if there is the possibility of politics in art, it lies in leaving the doors wide open. The editing makes a point of including footage that shows how these camera-wielding youngsters and their families relate to their housemaids and – in some cases where the ties stretch further back – to their children, families and backgrounds as well. In every case, despite feeling more or less empathy for a specific character, it is hard to determine a clear antagonist. Throughout the projection, the individual will – both in the camerawork and in what’s in front of it – to do the right thing is always clear, even though an often blind desire cannot be separated from its consequences. This careful construction jumbles the extremities of the sensible, as it demands a reorganization of the boundaries between the public and the private, documentary-maker and documentary film, work and affection,

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cause and effect, male and female, shot and reverse-shot. As typified as Vanuza’s universe is, the class issues that take the film inside this universe from such a distanced perspective are progressively shown to be more and more sensitive to the touch. The politics of this reorganization finds completion in the fact that, once the credits roll, we return to the world – best case scenario – with an altered perspective. If cinema today very rarely carries the revelatory power of Major Tomaz Reis’ early travelogues (and one only needs to watch Paulo Bruscky to clearly see how that is a concern in Gabriel Mascaro’s cinema), that void can be filled by the chance of establishing relations, which can often be themselves revealing: none of the blocks in Housemaids is as strong individually as it is within the movie, because what’s more impressive here is not a single moment, or a single reality, but the interpretation and organization made by the director and the fact that they all fit in the same drawer, the same continuum, the same term that lends itself as title to the film and to all those distinct lives. Gabriel Mascaro starts from a distance, but never uses the dispositive as an excuse to not implicate himself in the process. On the contrary: by assuming this wide portrait as dramaturgy, it is clear that there is no position more fragile in Housemaids than that of the director. From something so specific and localizable, Gabriel Mascaro arrives at broad questions that are so deeply rooted in everyday life that we hardly even notice them. The politics of the film resides in highlighting the historical weight that underpins each casual gesture, each behavioral standard we so distractedly repeat as we go about our quotidian choreography. If Brazilian society lives by codes so engrained that we don’t even recognize them as wounds, it is not cinema’s place to stitch them closed, much less open fresh cuts; but there is the possibility of pinpointing exactly where these sores are, and leaving them open, wide open.

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Politics behind the camera by Victor Guimarães Victor Guimarães is professor of Cinema and Audiovisual at the UNA university, as well as a film critic for the film magazine Cinética. He has published articles in books (Eduardo Coutinho, Cosac Naify, 2013), festival catalogues, retrospective screenings, (Hitchcock, De Palma, Rithy Panh, Jia Zhangke) and magazines (Galáxia, Devires). He has also published outside of Brazil (Imagofagía, Hambre, DocOnline, Lumière, La Furia Umana). He has been on the jury of film festivals (FICA, Fronteira), has participated in selection committees of forumdoc.bh (since 2012) and is also one of the programmers of Cineclube Comum. In addition, he was the programming coordinator of 16th Festival Internacional de Curtas de BH. originally published in cinética film magazine, may 2013. translated by victor guimarães

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The alliance between the manifested desire to discuss class relations in contemporary Brazil and the search for unconventional approaches to the filmed subject has become a constant presence in the films of Gabriel Mascaro since his second feature film, Um Lugar ao Sol (High-rise, 2009). Assuming different forms and achieving very distinct results, this double gesture – shared by films such as Pacific (2009) and Câmara Escura (2012) by Marcelo Pedroso – reaches an impressive radicalism in Housemaids (2012). In the three shots that precede the appearance of the title, we are introduced to one of the most audacious strategies of filmic construction in recent cinema: a small group of Brazilian adolescents – there will be seven in total – received a camera in order to make a documentary about their family’s housemaids and hand over the footage to the director. Everything we see on the screen is those images, edited as a fascinating drama (whose strengths are also examined by Fabio Andrade, here in this book). The image succeeding the title is a large, white house, with a showy surrounding garden. On the soundtrack, we hear a radio announcer: “There was once an island, where lived love, joy and other feelings.” A cut takes us directly inside the house. Vanuza, the first maid, irons clothes while listening to a morning message on the radio. The gesture in the editing is eloquent: Housemaids wants to penetrate the interior of the island, to enter the homes where love and joy mingle with oppressive labor relationships, where affection mixes with power, where veiled domination mixes with possible resistance. The “infiltration dispositive” (as named by Mariana Souto, in an essay published in Devires magazine) engendered by the film is the gateway to the everyday life and the anxieties of these seven characters that we get to know one by one. A dispositive is also an island, surrounded by boundaries on all sides. But it is only from this calculated circumscription – we see these relationships,

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these images, these gazes, and never abandon them – that the film can find its unpredictable bifurcations. The panoramic structure of Um Lugar ao Sol now gives way to an editing style that favors the constitution of dramatic blocks centered on each of the houses. While maintaining the narrative autonomy of each plot, the editing weaves underground relations between one story and the other. The scenes of daily work, the interactions between employers and employees, and the reports of the hardships of life, in and out of the house, pervade the entire film, and patiently densify the issues and the senses. In this proliferating structure, which makes the relationships between those who shoot and those who are filmed the central focus of our attention, a scriptural trace jumps to the eye: the multiple and intense variations of the imaginary space behind the camera as an aesthetic and political figure. If the stories of these lives touch us deeply, this is due to more than the narrative content placed on the scene. Housemaids is a film that makes the attention to the points of view not only an unavoidable question for the critic, but a condition for the spectator’s experience. Each shot of the film defies what Jacques Aumont, in L’oeil interminable, called a “radical cleavage” – ubiquitous in classic cinema, still majoritarian nowadays – between the space of the drama (made by the relation between on-screen and off-screen and everything that belongs to the scene viewed by the camera) and the space of enunciation. The question of who holds the camera, of how a person shoots, of which forces inhabit the frame and its borders is not a detail of the fruition, but a vector that installs us in the scene and surprises us all the time. Under the rigor of the dispositive – but also due to the power of editing – everything we see on screen is permanently impregnated by a gesture that we know doesn’t come from the filmmaker, but from someone fully inserted in those relationships. The gaze of the person who shoots remains in question, as well as the negotiations for the film to be done. In Vanuza’s small bedroom, the boss’s son films the hands of the maid when she finds a photograph depicting a birthday cake. “Remember? My cake!” – she addresses the space behind the camera. But she immediately rephrases that, still uncertain about the possessive pronoun appropriate to the situation: “My cake, your cake, you know, Claudomiro Neto?” Unseen in the image, but intensely present in the scene, the teenager rushes to interrupt her: “Yes, my cake that was made by you.” In the smallest gestures, in the little speech acts exchanged between the two sides of the camera, the affections overflow, the powers leak – the character who occupies the scene draws our attention as much as the character who is filming. This mode of attention imposes, at first glance, a Brechtian distancing effect: from the beginning, the evidence of the relationship between who occupies the center of the image and who remains ‘offstage’ are constantly suggested in the operation of the film, and requires us to look at each shot with an eye on the scene and another on its construction. This is how we follow the expropriation of the body and speech of Lena, a character always relegated to the off-screen space; that’s how we perceive how Sergio

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permanently refuses to say what is expected from him, until the moment that he escapes from the Christmas celebration to eat alone in the garage. In the complex game that the film invites us to witness, the traces of interaction are deposited on image and become a touchy subject. Continuing a gesture that is already present in Pacific, Housemaids asserts itself as a sort of ethnographic essay about the gazes and the points of view, recognizing in every gesture of mise-en-scène a way of looking at the other, a way to take a position in front of the world and in front of oneself. However, this procedure does not prevent us from projecting our entire body into those lives (the lives that expose themselves in front of the camera, as well as the lives that nestle behind it); in fact, it is the request of another approach, the construction of another place to the drift of the viewer. When Alana crouches to shoot Gracinha wiping the dust deposited under the couch, or when the same character decides to stay up late to spy on the maid in her nocturnal habits, who films and who is filmed acquire an equal dramatic status. The space in front of the camera and the space behind it are not two worlds apart, but permeable places in deep connection and constant interchange. In a dramatic climax of the film (that we receive with a disconcerting jolt), we are in the car with Vanuza, who drives the children to school. Until then, who inhabited the space behind the camera had been Claudomiro Neto, the teenager responsible for filming her. When Neto says goodbye and leaves the car, however, we realize that he kindly hands the camera to the maid, nevertheless scolding her for mishandling the buttons on the device. Briefly, she is the one who occupies the space of enunciation, directing her gaze to the teenagers on their way to school. This powerful inversion, however, only reaches its maximum potency when a new and decisive change of viewpoint shakes the structure that was until then taking place in the movie. Patiently adjusted on the dashboard, freed from the hand, the camera is now pointed at the one who, moments before, was observed by others. Alone, away from the bosses, as if in a mirror, Vanuza turns the frame into a receptacle of an unexpected performance: driving the car and directing the scene, accompanied by a romantic song by the Brazilian singer Reginaldo Rossi, she sings the lyrics: “If love sucks and makes you so miserable / quickly nip it in the bud / proper care is necessary / so you don’t hurt yourself”, and she weeps copiously, inscribing in each verse an incalculable heartbreak. “But I hurt myself,” she says, connecting the romantic formula to the singular experience, inaugurating a multiple and unlikely dialogue involving the singer, the listener, the distant love and, of course, the spectator. When Vanuza films herself and the power of speaking coincides with taking over the camera, the politics fractures and reorganizes itself along with the cinematic scene. Near the end, in the broken interactions between Luiz Felipe and Lucimar, a new variation pervades the space behind the camera and challenges what we believe concerning that universe. In the beginning of

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that seventh part of the movie, the camera captures the moment when the teenager asks the maid if she will allow him to make the documentary: the roles of documentarian and boss are mixed in the uncomfortable acceptance by the maid/character; disagreement is exposed. However, during the sequences assembled by the montage, we realize that this seemingly authoritarian figure, who had been agreed as the powerholder in the enunciation, progressively reveals different nuances, and seems to grow increasingly interested in investigating the complex emotional relationships existing in the house – confronting the mother, sometimes instigating a critical stance in his talks with Lucimar, the teenager tries to unravel the intriguing mystery of these childhood friends who became mistress and maid. Although the answers are both evasive and soothing, the discomfort caused by the investigation coming from behind the camera is strongly deposited on the images. Even more potently, in observational shots (in which the interaction becomes less present), the enunciation affirms itself in a highly provocative mise-en-scène. In a shot in the living room, the frame is broad enough to materialize – with an impressive power of synthesis – the division prevailing in the house. At the left side of the frame, mother and daughter leave through the front door on their way to the street; on the right side, framed by the kitchen door, Lucimar continues her everyday boring routine. Spaces, times, occupations and possible transits of employers and employees configure worlds apart, which the film scene – by virtue of how it is shot, but also of how it is edited – shows and dislocates before our eyes. In a final camera movement, all the complexity of relations between the gazes is rekindled once again. Along with Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on the soundtrack, the camera pans up and down a set of photographs, moving from the tickets for the concerts of international artists displayed on a panel on the wall – indexes of the economic power of the bosses – to the iconic photograph – carefully adjusted on the table – which portrays the maid and the mistress when still children, already so close and so inescapably distant. Between Luiz Felipe’s question (“Do you believe that you have freedom?”) and the positive response by Lucimar (at this point, absolutely unbelievable) that puts an end to the film, the verses of the old Dylan song still seem to resonate: “How many years can some people exist / Before they’re allowed to be free?” When it becomes a key space for the investment of the viewer’s sensibility – in the huge amount of figures that multiply in each shot – the space behind the camera acquires a mutant form, turning a movie that casts a beautiful and necessary look at Brazilian reality into a fruitful territory for the discovery of unexpected powers of the cinematic experience. Questioned by housemaids who answer the youngsters, exposed when the teenagers film themselves, put into question in each image, that space – so important to the theory of photography and so despised by the thinking about the cinematic art – becomes a political place par excellence. The wound in the heart of the Brazilian documentary opened by Aloysio Raulino and Deutrudes Carlos da

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Rocha in Jardim Nova Bahia (1971) finds in the relationships between the gazes in Housemaids – employers and employees, who observes and who is observed, the interviewer and the interviewed (or the one who bravely refuses to answer) – not the soothing healing of the end of a line, but a newly exposed wound that continues to bleed. When the space in front of the camera and the one behind it constitute an inexhaustible dramatic space in which affections go beyond the limits of the frame and powers become sensible in every shot, it’s the body of the spectator that can no longer be the same.

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Resurgent class relations in Brazilian film by Mariana Souto Mariana Souto is studying for a doctorate in Social Communication at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where she also took her masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree. With research on Brazilian cinema, she lectures on Audiovisual Narratives and Documentary Film. In addition to these academic duties, she administers film workshops and is a member of a research group on experiential poetics. She is co-programmer of the Comun Cineclube film club and sidelines as an art and costume director. translated by anthony doyle

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A little collective about-turn?

1960s Brazilian film has frequently been analyzed from the perspective of class issues and understood as per a so-called ‘sociological model’, an approximation to reality that hinges upon a desire for social transformation through art, allied with a denunciative will to alert the common folk to its own alienation, echoing throughout that output in a very particular language: explicative, third-person narratives, singularities steamrolled by totalizing perspectives, with people used as raw material for the construction of types, and interviews employed as a means of corroborating pre-conceived theories (Bernardet, 2003). At that time, filmmakers, particularly documentary makers, felt encumbered with a popular mandate (Xavier, 2006), as if they were the self-appointed spokespeople for the underclasses. In both Brasil em tempo de cinema – ensaio sobre o cinema brasileiro de 1958 a 1966 (1967) and Cineastas e imagens do povo (2003), Jean-Claude Bernardet analyzes Cinema Novo, observing, among other aspects, the alterities established therein. As he saw it, questions of class difference came between filmmakers and their themes, and this had more or less subtly observable results in their films. For Bernardet, Brazilian cinema saw itself as being close to the ground, as lending voice to the ‘class other’ (2003), but what it was really doing, though often in low-key ways, was addressing and expressing the dilemmas and problems of the middle class, the social layer to which these directors belonged. If, in the 60s, ideological and class issues were drawn out and underscored in films and filmic analyses, this changed drastically in the decades that followed. Starting in the 1970s and reaching a height in the 80s, Brazilian cinema veered toward a particularized focus, whittling themes into biographies and training its ear to the personal expression of specific subjects

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It was more of a change of focus than complete disappearance, as classrelated films can still be found in the 80s and 90s, albeit to a lesser degree than in earlier decades.

(Mesquita, 2010). Abandoning the sociological model, cinema regrounded in approaches and influences of a decidedly anthropological ilk (Xavier, 2006). This change of perspective accompanied the so-called subjective shift in the humanities (Sarlo, 2007) – a migration from broad diagnoses to the observation of singular experiences, from macro to micro history, from structures to subjects, and societies to individuals. With few exceptions, the class issue disappeared from film output and the theoretical corpus1. And yet, with the 2000s came a bevy of powerful Brazilian films that broached anew the problematic of class – albeit in other terms and fresh forms – drawing critical attention. Rua de mão dupla (Cao Guimarães, 2004), Santiago (João Moreira Salles, 2007), Pacific (Marcelo Pedroso, 2009), Um lugar ao sol (Gabriel Mascaro, 2009), Vista Mar (Rubia Mércia, Pedro Diógenes, Rodrigo Capistrano, Victor Furtado, Claugeane Costa, Henrique Leão, 2009), Vigias (Marcelo Lordello, 2010), Babás (Consuelo Lins, 2010), Câmara escura (Marcelo Pedroso, 2012), Doméstica/Housemaids (Gabriel Mascaro, 2012) strike one less as the swan songs of a dying discussion than the foreshocks of something returning with renewed vigor and in new formulations. After the subjective shift, are we now witnessing a minor ‘collective about-turn’? But... what about class today?

In 1967, Jean-Claude Bernardet wrote Brasil em tempo de cinema – ensaio sobre o cinema brasileiro de 1958 a 1966, in which he analyzed Cinema Novo up until that point. With its focus placed firmly on the middle class, this is perhaps the only book that takes class relations in Brazilian cinema as its fundamental concern. This seminal work mechanically projects the directors’ middle-class origins onto their cinema production, subsuming a plurality of works, plots and characters under the unmistakable traits of the middle class, often ignoring, in the process, the filmmakers’ genuine desire to engage with alterity. The reader has to skim away the residue of the hypertrophied ideology of the day in order to let the book’s real strengths shine through, such as the power of Bernardet’s analysis and the perspicacity of his insights. In fact, it is important that we ascertain to what extent it is still pertinent to discuss class today, a concept many dismiss as an outmoded throwback to an industrial age with less differentiation of labor. Some theorists speak of the dissolution of limits and frontiers, a standardization created by consumption, globalization and post-modernity, with some even questioning the existence of social classes at all. However, it seems to us a little early to consider Brazilian society exempt from class stratification, a notion perhaps rooted in an obsolete concept of class, and one that could lead to apolitical knock-on effects. If, in some theories, class is a subject that has fallen into disuse, the films in this new Brazilian corpus show how we deal with a concern that feeds a significant portion of our current cinematographic output, drawing considerable interest from a number of filmmakers and serving as an

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interpretive key to various contemporary films, both fiction and non-fiction. In Brazil, a country with a starkly unequal distribution of wealth, where valuable swaths of prime real estate lie encrusted with shantytowns, where there is a clear cultural divide between the center and the periphery, and tension is rife between employer and employee, class conflict is a powerful imbroglio with a stranglehold on relations. It remains for us to discuss how these issues have re-emerged in recent times, now that the sociological model is a thing of the past. Ilan Feldman (2013), devoted to studying the dynamics of appropriation of the other’s viewpoint in new regimes of visibility, highlights an important point: we might contend that performative and inclusive dynamics are reinforced, in a very interesting way, by the affirmation of a sort of class singularity, insofar as these films are recasting the issue of social class, so dear to the modern documentary, in terms of a “repositioning of singularity”, a pet notion of contemporary production. (Feldman, 2013, p.7) So, if class is making a comeback, it is not as a totalization or diagnosis, but rather as lingering attention paid to characters and the relationships between individuals, frequently in a form steeped in intimacy and affection. It is important to underscore that the abovementioned films have been analyzed not only for their restored focus on issues of class, but for their high degrees of cinematographic intervention. Many of these films have triggered debate on relevant characteristics of contemporaneity: new regimes of visibility, inventive forms of approach to given domains, originality in the creation of new devices and a rearranging of roles of those who film and are filmed. Three notes on nine films

In this context, we put together a selection of Brazilian films released between 2000 and 2010 in order to draw out certain connections. The nine films are: Rua de mão dupla, Santiago, Pacific, Um lugar ao sol, Vista Mar, Vigias, Babás, Câmara escura and Doméstica/Housemaids. A comparative methodology might seem more appropriate in this case, not only in order to capture the particularities of each film, but also to bring out connections and relations between them, seeing as we have discerned a certain ‘movement’ here – the emergence of class relations in a group of films. However, rather than analyze each film in turn, our aim is to map, as it were, the fabric that underpins the set. Some preliminary observations are presented below in three brief subsections. a) Employers and employees, the filming and the filmed Many of the films mentioned above deal with relationships between employers and domestic employees, an area that seems to be one of the few

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remaining hotbeds of class tensions in cinema today. If present-day documentaries seem less concerned with the factory floor, trade unions and workers striking against bourgeois capitalists, or, for that matter, with northeastern migrants, destitute, illiterate backlanders and their struggle against wealthy landowners, or even construction workers on big-city building sites (as in Viramundo [Geraldo Sarno, 1968], Maioria absoluta [Leon Hirszman, 1964], ABC da greve [Leon Hirszman, 1990], Linha de montagem [Renato Tapajós, 1982], Braços cruzados, máquinas paradas [Roberto Gervitz, Sergio Toledo, 1979], among others), domestic workers have proved far more present. Babás, Santiago, Doméstica/Housemaids, Vigias (with the exception of Santiago, all named after professions: nannies, domestics, watchmen) focus on staff working in middle- and upper-class apartments, houses or buildings, configuring relationships that blur the boundaries between public and private space, professional and personal life, formality and intimacy. If, as Carla Barros points out, “this intimacy, in a sense, serves to ‘irrigate’ the aridity of power relations” (Barros, 2007, p.123), it can also muddy respective expectations, leaving subjects on shaky ground, confused about their rights and duties – ‘she’s practically family’ goes the age-old line about domestic employees. At the same time as it dilutes the sobriety and softens the orders, this emotional proximity masks underlying hierarchies and disguises abuses of authority. Relationships between employers and domestic employees are also problematized in such fiction films as Trabalhar Cansa (Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, 2011) and O som ao redor (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012), through relations of alterity fraught with an intense sense of fear and paranoia – the threat posed by having the ‘class other’ under your roof. In the light of the abovementioned films, based as they are upon interaction between director/filmmaker/boss and filmed subjects/ employees, we can discern a certain complexity deriving from the fact that a pre-existing social balance of power underlies the cinematographic balance of power. b) The architecture of the scene and architecture of the space ‘Architecture’ is used here in the sense of a drafted plan, as such, it is practically synonymous with the filmic device, though it also refers to the geographic spaces in which the characters have their mise-en-scène. By ‘device’ we understand the method of a film, its way of approaching a given object. The concept here does not exactly refer to the conception of cinema as device, but to the strategy employed in filming, i.e., the creation of rules with which to deal with the reality in-hand (Lins, 2007), the narrative strategy that produces events in the image and in the world (Migliorin, 2005). We therefore speak of the device as method, but also as a more specific trend in contemporary documentary filmmaking, namely the device-documentary, which has a rigid propositional dimension to it, revealing the groundwork and operations that tee up the filming itself. Rua de mão dupla, Pacific, Doméstica, Vista Mar and Câmara escura could all be

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described as falling into this category, because they lay their devices bare, follow a strict protocol of spatial and/or temporal limitation, and invent a game or plan an experiment. Each procedure, different in its own right, speaks of the relationship between the documentary-maker and the filmed subjects, the architecture of a plan of operation in a given context, the conception of alterity and ethics in one’s dealings with the other, in short, of a whole vision of the world: “ways of doing are ways of thinking” (Comolli, 2008, p.26). It is interesting to note how these devices evince the balance of power that pervades class relations. In Housemaids, for example, though the mise-en-scène is largely left to the teenagers doing the filming, at times what we see is a dual effort, with the maids offering suggestions and putting in performances that guide the camera in its task. There is also a lot of reticence and shyness, maybe even a certain resistance before the other’s power – if the balance of power does not permit the domestic to interrupt or refuse the filming, at least she (or he) can hold back and maintain some degree of privacy during the interviews. After all, as Foucault tells us, where there is power there is also the chance to resist it. Besides the architecture of the scene, the architecture of the places and territories is also significant in terms of the occupation of social space and the ways in which people and classes are distributed across the urban dynamic. The penthouses of Um lugar ao sol, the ocean-view apartments in Vista Mar, the dark, confined grounds and sentry posts of Vigias, the high walls and security paraphernalia that turn homes into fortresses in Câmara escura, the decor and personal effects of each character who moves in or out in Rua de mão dupla, the omnipresent (and sometimes imposing) homes in Santiago and Doméstica/Housemaids and the ship aboard which Pacific is set in its entirety, are all spaces/settings ripe for investigation, at once stages for and agents of the most varied relations. Spatial, urbanistic and architectonic experiences of the city very often function as metaphors for social hierarchies and pyramids: this would seem to be the case in Um lugar ao sol and Vigias, which form a particularly interesting and complementary cinematic pair. While the first-mentioned looks at the inhabitants of sumptuous penthouses, the second focuses on the security guards patrolling the grounds. While the former enjoy open horizons and bask in the sun, the latter man the walls and gates and stand guard into the depths of the night – the result is a social gulf between those who sleep peacefully (or not) in their beds, and those who watch over them as they slumber. The comparative methodology enables us to see how class differences not only reside within these films, but can also emerge between them, through contrast. c) The infiltration device2 In some cases, the device the director crafts seems to belong to a strategy of approximation toward a given sphere of intimacy which would otherwise be inaccessible (or totally distorted by the presence of a director

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2 The idea of the infiltration device was developed more thoroughly in another article. See Souto, Mariana. ‘O direto interno, o dispositivo de infiltração e a miseen-scéne do amador – Notas sobre Pacific e Doméstica’. Devires – Cinema e Humanidade, Belo Horizonte, vol.9, no.1, 2012.

3 An almost retroactive presence, in the case of Pacific.

coming in from the outside, along with crew and equipment. The infiltration device is a way of getting around these barriers so as to take a look behind closed doors, sneaking a peek into the everyday lives of social classes, particularly the upper echelons. Pacific, Doméstica/Housemaids, Vista Mar and Câmara escura all employ infiltration as a technique, as a means of slipping into a given world through the back door, enabling the camera to poke around while causing minimal disturbance. In some of these cases the hardware of film is whittled down to a camera3, as if the whole notion of the relationship, the very idea behind the film, were condensed into and condemned to that simple device, to be inserted and extracted by remote control, from a distance; after its little foray into other worlds, it returns to its ‘owners’. In this sense, the camera is like a mirror hoisted over an enemy’s battlements, or perhaps even a Trojan horse. Câmara escura takes an even more radical approach, wielding the camera like a weapon – a motion sensor, a tracking device, a bomb. After terrifying some residents with his mysterious box, director Marcelo Pedroso is invited to explain himself to the police. What is he up to? What does he plan to do with the footage? The recordings are plucked out of the realm of cinema to become items of evidence, proof of a possible crime. Pedroso draws upon the logic of the elements he aims to critique – paranoia and surveillance – in order to, in a terrorist-like fashion, challenge the lifestyles of the rich and combat the posturing of the elite. Eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth. In Pacific and Doméstica/Housemaids, however, the idea is to capture the chosen context without any exterior interference. Of course, the presence of Gabriel Mascaro or Marcelo Pedroso in these homes or aboard that ship would have led to completely different films, eliciting certain behaviors while inhibiting others. Their choice of the infiltration device showed they were aware of this possibility and formulated rules and approaches to coax out (or at least not drive away) one important element: intimacy, something that could only exist between people who already share a bond and history. However, we cannot naively expect these images to be a pure record of situations that would have played out irrespective of the camera. The filmed settings are modified by the insertion of the filmic apparatus; the device is not just a key to a locked world, but is also a productive element in its own right. If in Pacific the crew’s intervention only occurs after the camera stops rolling, and what we have witnessed are relations as they actually unfolded (although generally not independent of the presence of the camera), in Doméstica/Housemaids the interactions are produced by the film, seeing as the bonds between the employees and their employers’ teenage children receive the unexpected mediation of a camera and a task. Though in Doméstica/Housemaids and Pacific the aim of the infiltration is to observe a protected intimacy whilst causing the lowest possible impact

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in terms of apparatus, Um lugar ao Sol, Vista Mar and Câmara escura approach the act of infiltration almost as an end in itself, as it is effectively an incursion into enemy territory, an act of guerilla warfare. The intention, in these cases, is ballistic.

*** Despite its inconclusive character, this article has raised questions, sowed the seeds of doubt and drafted hypotheses. Faced with a complex panorama of resurgent class issues in Brazilian cinema, it is an attempt to ascertain the viability of possible readings along these lines. In this nascent context of a minor ‘collective about-turn’, in which we contrast and compare nine films from the 2000s, certain observations already seem significant, evincing specificities of the contemporary revival of class issues in comparison with earlier times, namely: the way relations between domestic workers and their employers interfere in the relationship between filmmakers and their subjects; the architecture of the mise-en-scène pervaded by power; and the constitution of shrewd and sophisticated infiltration devices4.

4 Passages from the present text can be found in the annals of the 22nd Compós and in the article ‘Doméstica’, co-written with Cláudia Mesquita and published in the book organized by the Poetics of Experience Research Group at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

References Barros, Carla. ‘Trocas, hierarquias e mediação: as dimensões culturais do consumo em um grupo de empregadas domésticas’. Doctoral thesis. Instituto COPPEAD de Administração, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2007. Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Brasil em tempo de cinema: ensaio sobre o cinema brasileiro de 1958 a 1966. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007. ____. Cineastas e imagens do povo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. Comolli, Jean-Louis. Ver e poder: a inocência perdida: cinema, televisão, ficção, documentário. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2008. Feldman, Ilana. Jogos de cena – ensaios sobre o documentário brasileiro contemporâneo. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2013. Lins, C. ‘O filme-dispositivo no documentário brasileiro contemporâneo’. In Sobre fazer documentário. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2007. Mesquita, Cláudia. ‘Retratos em diálogo: notas sobre o documentário recente’. In Novos Estudos, Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP), São Paulo, no. 86, 2010, pp.105-118. Migliorin, Cezar. ‘O dispositivo como estratégia narrativa’. Digitagrama –

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Revista Acadêmica de Cinema, Rio de Janeiro, 2005, vol. 3. Available at: http://www.estacio.br/graduacao/cinema/digitagrama/numero3/ cmigliorin.asp. Accessed on 02/07/2012. Sarlo, Beatriz. Tempo passado: cultura da memória e guinada subjetiva. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras; Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2007. Souza, Jessé; Arenari, Brand. Os batalhadores brasileiros: nova classe média ou nova classe trabalhadora? Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2010. Xavier, Ismail. Cinema brasileiro moderno. 3rd ed. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2006.

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II. Questions and answers, film and domestication 45

Not everything is said

A conversation between Jean-Louis Comolli and Daniela Capelato Daniela Capelato holds a degree in Communication. She spent 1988 at the Institut National de lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Audiovisuel (INA) in France, where she took part in the production of documentary series for French, English and German TV. Between 1995 and 2001 she managed the Cinema and Video department at ItaĂş Cultural, where she coordinated and produced film exhibitions including Anos 60 and Marginalia 70, and produced the documentaries Santo Forte by Eduardo Coutinho, and O Prisioneiro da Grade e Ferro by Paulo Sacramento, among others. In 2001 she founded DOC. FILMES, which, in partnership with production companies in Brazil and abroad, has produced a number of documentaries and feature films. She is presently working on the feature project Um Certo Joaquim by Marcelo Gomes, in conjunction with REC Produtores Associados, and the featurelength documentary on anorexia, Um Vidro na minha Pele by Moara Passoni and Henrique Xavier.

translation (french to portuguese) by simon armand berjeaut translation (portuguese to english) by anthony doyle

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D ani C apelato – Let’s start with the procedure. How do you see the film’s device?

J ean -L ouis C omolli – The device is very simple. But what strikes me as most interesting isn’t the device, which is nothing extraordinary in itself, and which could have been explored in a very different way, had the direction opted to probe the employer/domestic relationship more. I understand that this was a sensitive point, but having said that, there’s a very well-finished progression to the film that slowly brings to bear the fact that there is this strange, almost incestuous relationship between the two. There comes a point when the maid starts to become a de facto member of the family, sometimes a sort of substitute mother. These are things that you can see in practice, in reality, not only here in Brazil, but also here in Brazil, and obviously in a very strong way. For me, the essential aspect is this: the director knew how to respect – more than respect, sustain – these women’s discourse. A simple discourse, yes, but one with a lot of weight behind it, because their stories are very violent.

D.C. – It’s one of the most violent films I’ve seen in my life. J-L.C. – This violence does appear, but only as appropriate, I mean, this is not a denunciation, as it could have become, and would have been in the hands of other directors, but rather a friendly confession, in which things are confided to the camera, and to the girl or guy doing the filming, but without rancor or resentment, or with very little resentment in some cases. This is just psychology, but in terms of the formatting of the discourse, it is very important, because it reaches us as a discourse... I wouldn’t say a serene discourse, but one coated with life experience. And

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that’s what it’s about. It’s about a discourse in which life experience acquires density. However, it’s a discourse that is neither vacuous nor fuelled by complaint alone. In fact, there’s very little complaint in this film, and, in a sense, these women carry a certain joy with them. The joy of life, even if it’s not always obvious. But you can feel the energy, the desire, the internal richness, which has little room for expression within this closed circle of housekeeping, the house, the family, but is still there nevertheless. The characters are magnificent. As always, in these cases, the viewer would like to see more, to go deeper into each of them, and, obviously, that ends at some point. So the principle of frustration is at work here. And the principle of frustration, no matter how much it irritates the viewer, is a good principle to have. It’s the principle of cinema itself: you have to let things be grasped, let things be glimpsed, let things be felt, but without exhausting them, or repeating them; without banging away at the same drum. So that gives us a certain liberty. It’s about a discourse that could have been imposed, but wasn’t. At the same time, this also shows us a film that wasn’t made, which could have been made, and which might have been even more violent than this one. I have the impression that the power and violence these women carry within themselves do appear, but they were not worked on as such. They could have been brought out in a more radical way. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a film that, for me, is one of the milestones of the filmed discourse, Imamura’s History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon Sengoshi – Madamu onboro no Seikatsu, 1970). Imamura, who must have visited a lot of these bars, came across this truly extraordinary hostess. She’s at the center of the film and she tells her story, which is also a history of Japan, because she came from a family of butchers, which was a caste apart, a social underclass, treated with disdain, etcetera. During the war, these butchers ran a black market that made them very rich. And she talks about that openly, like it was the most natural thing in the world. As she does her sex life, with the same tranquility, describing what it’s like to have sex with Japanese men, who are not nice. She’d had three or four of them, and hated it, because they were authoritarian, demanding, violent, and so on. On the other hand, she found herself developing a deep affection and love for the American sailors who passed through the military port of Yokozuka. The stroke of genius in this film is the way the director confronts this girl with images of the postwar period, showing her footage spanning the 25 to 30 years between the surrender and the moment of filming. And she doesn’t just respond to those images, rather she recounts them as someone who lived through all that. So you see that grandstand events transpired that barely registered with her, while she could give detailed anecdotes about Japanese students, bar fights... The history of Japan was written in violence, far more violence than I’d imagined. You see the assassination of the socialist Prime Minister, stabbed to death in the middle of Parliament, and other episodes of similar density. And, little by little, you see the fiber of Japan being invaded by the

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American way of life, its old traditions crumbling, American laws replacing old Japanese laws, and yet there’s this girl, who spurns Japanese men in favor of American sailors. So what you have there is a correspondence between the social body and the individual body. That’s really interesting. But what I want to say is that Imamura films this woman talking non-stop, for two hours, while also showing archive footage of the events she refers to. So, what you can catch in Housemaids, and I think it’s formidable that you can catch it, and it’s a testament to the film’s richness, is that, while you can sense that everything is there, not everything is said. The film does not get to the bottom of its characters. It leaves them at a certain juncture, after they’ve said some important stuff, and without trying to extract more. It’s a principle that’s as positive as it is negative, as so often happens in cinema. It’s ambivalent. It’s positive because it leaves an outer field that the viewer has to fill in for himself, through imagination. But it’s also not so positive because it suggests a lack of boldness. Before the camera, the discourse is strong, certainly, but I got the feeling that, behind the camera, it wasn’t so strong. It’s not lazy, but it doesn’t pursue more than the device proposed. Today, after Imamura and many others, people think that major films about discourse are films in which the discourse is free, managed with a great deal of flexibility and care, without violence, without encroachment, just allowing it to unfurl freely. That’s all fine and well, but, within the cacophony and bedlam of discourses, of the billions of words being shared around the planet, and with which we are constantly bombarded through radio and television – as Gilles Deleuze would say, everyone has something to say – the conditions are the problem. And yet, cinema continues to be cinema. Making people express themselves is no easy task, but the director really succeeds in doing it. But, when all is said and done, does he manage to create a device that allows us to really hear, really grasp, what these women say? Partly yes and partly no... I have my reservations. Partly no because, behind the camera, on the side of the person doing the filming, there isn’t much work. I mean, there are some fragments that show us very clearly that what these maids are saying involves, emotionally, the people doing the filming. At the same time, very often they’re actually talking about those same teenagers. Which is exactly why they’re the ones doing the filming anyway. But the violence and force of what the women are saying is not necessarily being heard by the guy or girl holding the camera. There’s an inequality that means that the viewer’s hearing is not directed to another type of hearing, which would be that of the protagonists. And yet, filming always implies listening. The camera is an ear, to film is to listen. And what does it mean to listen? To listen is to absorb the discourse of others, to interiorize it. In other words, it’s to be modified, in a way; to be transformed, to be changed. It’s by moving through the body that discourse makes sense. Cinema was made to film that.

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I recognize that that’s not easy to achieve, but that’s what it’s all about. It’s about ensuring that the viewer’s capacity to listen, which is obviously necessary, indispensable, and, in this sort of film, obligatory, becomes enabled. But that listening is not automatic, it has to be constructed. You have to build the viewer’s listening power.

D.C. – That’s one of the major aspects of this film. The director’s involvement was entirely in the editing room. He’s not a body, not the subject of the film. The subject is someone who is also an object of the film. But, through these interviews, these recordings, there’s no way of knowing where exactly that filmic object belongs. J-L.C. – Of course, I left out the place of the director, which is a real place, that doesn’t appear in the fiction the film proposes. But what does stand out in that fiction is the fact that there are children in these families and that each of them has a relationship with the housemaid. So that subsidiary relationship, relationship with the domestic help, between the housemaid and the child of the manor, which is a classic literary staple, in Dickens and others, this relationship is doubled by the fact that it’s the child who’s doing the filming. The guy or girl is filming his or her nanny, the person who performed the role of nanny, and it’s interesting to see that duplication. D.C. – It’s the master and slave, a relationship of authority. J-L.C. – There is that, but when you film someone, you have to become totally involved, you’ve got to establish another relationship, a non-predatory relationship. I’d call it a love story. There’s something flowing between the two parties. This is there in the film, potentially, virtually, which is good, but I’d say a mirror is lacking in which we can see the face of these kids reacting to what the maid says at times. It’s not a case of seeing everything, of pushing it to the border with obscenity, but I think there were other ways to elide them, and with stronger effects. The women speak, but who hears them? Apparently, in the film, those doing the filming are not constructed in the same way as those doing the listening. They are constructed as those doing the filming. At no time are they shown listening or heard responding. They could have been given that voice, to say: no, what you just said isn’t true, or I don’t know. There could have been dialogue. D.C. – This film is about the history of Brazil and its very specific context. Brazil is a country where the processes of slavery and even those of Independence were carefully negotiated. Everything is negotiated, despite the conflict and resistance. Of course there was slave resistance, and indeed revolts, but there was largely a dance between the whites – Portuguese and others – and the slaves, a dance that blurred lines, through seduction, through sex, through the ascension of some slaves into the private sphere of the whites

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and the prevailing elite. And things tended to pan out. The typical Brazilian is someone who doesn’t talk about politics. This kind of issue, such as domestic help in Brazil, is taboo. When the film came out, Congress had just passed a law that regulated the working life of the domestic employee, where there had been no regulations before. Now they have fixed working hours, a lunch hour. Many of these changes have altered the relationship completely. These employees now have rights, a certain emancipation, a private life, and that’s so very different from the lives they had before. For the families that depend on these women, the change was a crisis. It caused a lot of debate. Sociologically and anthropologically, this change totally rearranged things. How do you win emancipation? Where does the conflict lie? I think that, in this film, the main conflict is the non-conflict.

J-L.C. – These two categories, employers and domestic employees, are linked by a shared life, by daily domesticity, through childcare, etc., and, in a sense, this interdependence makes the dissolution of these bonds almost impossible, because they’re necessary. In Losey’s The Servant (1963), the master becomes the slave, the one who serves. D.C. – It’s a Hegelian power-play in which the relationship between master and slave becomes almost hysterical. J-L.C. – It corresponds to the need on either side. On the employer’s side, there’s the need to appear not to be exploiting or demeaning, the need to be the decent employer, respectable in every way. D.C. – There’s one woman, Gracinha, who fills the house up, she’s such a part of it. Suddenly, she says that she can’t remember the last time she went home. She hadn’t had time off in such a long while, and then she starts talking about her son’s death, while she was there, working for her boss. She was working when the news arrived, and she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d last seen her own son. J-L.C. – Now that’s what you call a ‘crack’. Everything looked hunky-dory and then, all of a sudden, you discover there’s a crack running down the middle, and when you look into it, you see the horror. You see that the Brazilian poor lead far more dramatic, more dangerous lives than the rich. There is an honesty to it all, and you can see that the director is concerned with making those women, and that man, appear as they really are, with all their power, beauty, zaniness and dramas too. We’re looking at real people here. That’s what I liked about this film, as in all great documentaries. The work lies in allowing the other to come to the fore, to appear. Because the other is not someone there to serve me. Unlike in fiction, the other is free. These women, these domestics, could perfectly well have decided they didn’t want to be filmed. In fact, in some cases, they ask to stop

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the filming. The privilege of documentary filmmaking is that the people being filmed have the freedom to stop when they want. That’s something unimaginable in a fiction-film context...

D.C. – At the same time, each woman is a little fiction. Each brings a nearmythical, mythological tale. J-L.C. – I will probably draw on this film in a piece I’m planning to write, because it confirms one of the hypotheses that underlie my work, which is this: what emerges from so-called documentary filmmaking is precisely that – that each person carries fictions. Fiction is part of each subject. It’s just, most of the time, these fictions don’t appear. They remain buried, people are too busy, or lack the intellectual means, to reveal them, but each and every human being has his own inner fictions. So ‘living’ means spinning fictions. We craft a fiction of the self in which oneself is the hero, subject and victim. That’s what documentary film reveals, while in fiction cinema, this is delegated to the other, to the actor or the character. But in documentary, there’s no step-away, it’s your neighbor, which is not exactly the same thing. Each subject has its singularity, which means his or her fiction will not be exactly the same as that of the neighbor. But even if both are truck drivers traveling between Warsaw and Paris week in, week out, they will each have their own private fiction. That’s what matters to me. That’s what gives us a glimmer of hope for human salvation. This subject presents itself very precisely today, because we are witnessing the destruction of humanity, of the humanity of the human being. D.C. – The world of Housemaids is very feminine, but a lot of the kids doing the filming are boys. J-L.C. – This is important. I’m convinced that, in cinema, women should film men and men, women. I’m convinced of that. D.C. – Why? J-L.C. – Because the cinematographic device, in itself, re-establishes a certain equality. This equality, in the case of the relationship between men and women, brings the man down to size, which is very important, while bringing the woman up to scale, which is just as important. I love it, and I’ve filmed women lots of times, at work, within their discourse, etc. And they’ve always been so strong. They are more powerful than men. D.C. – What is the viewer’s place in Housemaids? J-L.C. – For me, the viewer’s place is, first and foremost, the position of listener. Because in a film what is conveyed from the director to the viewer is

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absorbed content. One of the dimensions that appeared in the film – and which always does in documentaries, but particularly so in this one – is that the people being filmed, whoever they are, are very much aware that this is a privileged moment which they should make the most of. It’s not always the case, but most of the time the people being filmed know that they won’t have many opportunities like that again, and so seize the day. An actor always assumes he’ll be before the camera on various other occasions throughout his career, and many of them manage that, but for people like you and me, the reality’s another. I think everyone knows that, and takes that tack: this is it, this is my chance to show myself. I’ve seen many other Brazilian documentaries in which neither the bodies nor the discourses of the subjects were approached in so successful a manner. It’s often the opposite in fact; people aren’t taken seriously, aren’t worked as characters, as such, and are given far too little space in which to exist.

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Housemaids, domestication and servility by Nicole Brenez Nicole Brenez is a film critic, theorist and historian. She is professor at the Paris University III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and film programmer of the Vanguard Sessions at the Cinemateca Francesa and the experimental film section of the Cinéma du Réel Festival. She has programmed special sessions in institutions like the Anthology Film Archives, the Tate Modern, the Filmmuseum of Vienna and the Portuguese Cinematetheque. She’s author of De la figure en general et du corps en particulier (Ed. De Boeck, 1998), Abel Ferrrara: Le mal mais sans fleurs – Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France (Cinemathèque Française, 2001) and others works. translation (french to portuguese) by simon armand berjeaut translation (portuguese to english) by anthony doyle

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In the history of collective representations, domestic workers have known three basic forms of treatment: sublime dedication, which runs from the Old Testament maidservant Hagar, given to Abraham by his wife Sarah, to Gustave Flaubert’s brilliant critique of the same tradition in Un cœur simple (A Simple Heart, 1876); violent revolt and opposition, in the political version of Spartacus or the psychological version of the Papin sisters, who murdered their employers in 1933 and inspired Jean Genet and Nico Papatakis; and mimetic alignment with the masters, the tradition of antiquity in Greek and Roman theater, which enabled the deuteragonists to flaunt what was only implicit in the protagonists, including their libidinal impulses. However, in Housemaids, Gabriel Mascaro explores another field, the least fulfilling one possible, in which events, trials, and positive and negative heroism are less likely to occur, namely: the field of resignation. Very gently, thanks to the device of delegating the actual filming, Housemaids describes all the forms of oppression to which seven domestics (six women and one man) are subjected in their daily lives: a physically draining routine, due to the sheer number of hours spent doing the same repetitive and mind-numbing chores; an emotionally draining environment, given the constant demands of others; a psychically draining context, through constant exposure to repetitive and mind-numbing TV and radio; soft and toxic exploitation by the employers and their families; endemic poverty; exploitation by their spouses, who almost always abandon them; and exploitation of their image by the teenagers encumbered with filming them. These domestics often cry on camera, sometimes almost breaking down. On other occasions they turn to singing or, on one occasion, to dance, as a way of forgetting their problems and seeking momentary relief (Flávia’s highly sensual dance before a disabled child is an act which the film zooms in on as the most disturbing,

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embarrassing and transgressive of all). These people don’t protest and never rebel. The film’s point of view resides in its structure. Initially, Housemaids embarks on an economic course: from the first to the sixth episode, the film is an increasingly dizzying dive that takes us from the shallows of modesty to the depths of misery – Flávia’s material penury (but who still has a home of her own) and the psychic poverty of Sérgio (a man incapable of providing for himself or his family and so shackled to his boss’s home, in an alliance of their respective angsts). In parallel, as the seventh episode ties in with the first, the film sets off down a more political path, taking us from the nooks and crannies of alienation (love songs on the radio) to the most famous musical protest of all, Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. In the process, it also takes us from the images of reification (TV soaps) to family photos that bear raw witness to the existence of economic fate: two girls, raised together as best friends, until one of them grew up to become the other’s maid. As the bourgeois employer says, in a scene of frightening symbolic violence soaked in bad conscience and hypocrisy: “I had to assert myself in the role of boss.” Over the course of the film, the notion of ‘domestication’ itself appears in equal measure to the individual portraits of the seven domestics: alienation from the self through the latent power of duty, tacit consent and psychic self-mutilation. And this holds true for both sides of the equation: masters and slaves. When one employer reveals, with tears of regret, shame and self-compassion, that she took the pregnant Lena to hospital but didn’t hang around for the birth, the sluice opens on all that ordinary violence, not just of the class struggle itself, but of the way each so readily conforms to it – a jet that springs from a vast river underground. It is this, not the condition of being a domestic, that is really servile here: servility to one’s own class interests, identification with a social position and role, obedience to the status quo to the detriment of one’s own feelings. In this sense, Housemaids fulfils an important visual function, like that which Gabriel de Tarde developed on forms of imitation in Les lois de l’imitation (The Laws of Imitation, 1890), which inspired Marcel Proust, or that which Georg Simmel devised on paths of domination at the center of forms of socialization in Sociologie (Sociology, 1908). We would like to be able to show Vanuza, Dilma, Gracinha, Lena, Flávia, Sérgio and Lucimar the documentary Remue-ménage dans la soustraitance (Hustle in Sub-contracting) by Ivora Cusack (2008). During four years, two collectives accompanied the struggles of 20 domestics in Paris. Exploited by an agency, these immigrant women from Senegal, Mauritania and Martinique, lumbered with all the social disadvantages that come from being on the wrong end of tradition and globalization, learned to fight back, defend themselves and each other, and demand their rights. Paid to clean and tidy, they learned to mess up the status quo: the roles of wife and mother, the foyers of the hotels they were hired to clean and where they held

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picnic protests, and the social and economic order that relegated them to a silent, invisible brand of slavery. We would love to see the jubilation of people like Fatoumata Coulibaly – who overcame exploitation and dismissal, her shyness and the difficulties imposed by the French language and labor laws – become contagious and spread. We would love to see these Brazilian domestics discover and relate to the similar lives of their immigrant peers in France. We’d love to see them – perhaps with Luiz beside them, the magnificent son who so poignantly films Lucimar signing her use of image forms – switch off the TV and go online to visit the International Labor Organization (ILO) website.

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The obligation to ask is different from the obligation to answer by Moacir dos Anjos Moacir dos Anjos is a contemporary art researcher and curator with the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation in Recife, where he also directed the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (2001-2006). He curated the Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and the 29th São Paulo Bienal (2010). His published works include, as author, the books Local/Global. Arte em Trânsito (2005) and ArteBra Crítica. Moacir dos Anjos (2010), and, as editor, Caderno Videobrasil 8 - Pertença, São Paulo (2013). translated by anthony doyle

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Housemaids (2012) is no accident. It’s a film that furthers and deepens original investigations that its director, Gabriel Mascaro, began in other, earlier works. Investigations, indeed, that ally the desire to fracture the consensuses that organize and limit modes of life with the search for the formal inventiveness that lies latent in cinema. The desired fracturing runs like craquelure through sedimented modes of understanding the world that are neither suggested by, nor inscribed in, any discourse predating the films, but which emerge from the director’s own creations.1 However, it is not our purpose here to map the ways in which this ample constructive ideology operates in Housemaids, or even to assess what comes of it in this specific case, but merely to signal issues that pervade and firmly anchor the film, setting it apart as a mature work whose meanings refuse to keep within set lines. If, at first glance, Housemaids seems to be a film about the lives of those who work in other people’s houses, tending to the domestic chores, the process of its construction broadens and complicates that impression. As the film unfolds, it soon becomes clear that Housemaids’ intentions go beyond and deviate from the remit suggested by its title in order to focus on the relations these women (and in rare cases men) establish with the families of their employers. Relations in which clearly distinct forms of belonging to the world and something akin to shared affection loom close and touch without ever fully mixing. It is precisely because of his interest in what is so vague in these relations – rather than any attempt to describe, in images and speech, what characterizes paid domestic labor – that Gabriel Mascaro relinquishes the authority his role as the film’s director would invest him with to interview these domestics himself in order to entrust the task instead to seven teenagers who cohabit and interact with them on a daily basis.

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1 See, in particular, the films KFZ-1348 (2008), co-directed by Marcelo Pedroso, Um lugar ao sol (2009), Avenida Brasília Formosa (2010) and A onda traz, o vento leva (2012), in which diverse themes and issues are presented through filmic devices created in response to their specificities.

For the period of one week, each of these youths, from different parts of Brazil, was asked to film and converse with the maids paid to cook, clean, iron and babysit in their homes. To Gabriel Mascaro fell the task of editing this raw material and presenting, in a chain of episodes, snatches of a reality that is not so easy to pin down. The recorded encounters, shown in a certain way, ended up rendering more evident the nature of what it is that separates people like those temporarily brought together in Housemaids.

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The choice of teenagers as the interlocutors of the interviewed housemaids – rather than their parents, the ones who effectively pay the wages – minimizes the constraints and embarrassment that explicit economic subordination would have caused. Though ‘owners’ of the houses in which the maids work, these youths have yet to incorporate fully in body and speech the array of mechanisms of social separation that will likely come to determine and control their behavior in adult life. Moreover, as it is not they who are actually responsible for keeping the maids in their employ, the teen-interviewers feel more at liberty to explore their curiosity about their subjects’ lives, especially when seemingly authorized to do so by the mission entrusted to them by the film’s director. However, from the maids’ perspective, the inescapable fact that their interlocutors are their employers’ children creates a discernible chasm between their respective tones and approaches, even if less than one would expect were it the bosses themselves formulating such personal questions. As a direct result, and to greater or lesser degrees, the maids effectively feel obliged to answer the questions put to them, even when they would clearly rather not. The unequal balance of power is unmistakable even in the way the interviewers obtain their consent for use of image, which, as one particular scene shows, leaves little room for refusal. The ambiguity of this relationship between the children of the employers (interviewers) and the domestics (interviewees) is accentuated by their long years of cohabitation – sometimes over a decade and, in certain cases, for as long as the interviewer has been on this earth. Some of the domestics being filmed have known the youths now inquiring about their lives since they were tikes, wholly dependent upon them, and from this comes a bond not entirely regulated by distinctions of class or occupation; regulations that become gradually clearer and stronger as the kids grow up and approach adulthood. It is in that narrow and narrowing space between the intimacy of old and a fast-encroaching distance that these filmed encounters take place. Not surprisingly, then, one of the film’s greatest merits is that it manages to capture circumstances in which notions of proximity and aloofness are somewhat muddled.

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In Housemaids, the obligation to ask is not of the same order as the obligation to answer. While the former is fruit of an agreement between equals entered into with the director, the latter is almost an imposition, given the hierarchical relationship that exists between the adolescents formulating the questions and the household employees to whom they are directed. However, on various occasions, the questions and answers peel away from what we would expect of such a rigid partition between those who give orders and those who obey them; moments at which the filmic process makes itself felt as a critical device unlike any other. The need these youngsters feel to learn about the lives of those who work in their homes – the basic motor behind the film – invites and authorizes the domestics to speak of matters that would otherwise never be mentioned in that space or before those people. Matters that, for the interviewers, sometimes volley back questions that wrong-foot and disturb, even if only temporarily and to no major degree, the naturalness with which they have always faced the state of affairs played out within their homes. In the majority, these are stories that evoke, more or less explicitly, the social abyss that separates people who cohabit each day in the same physical space and in some cases even sleep beneath the same roof (still quite common in Brazil). In contrast with the almost always safe and materially buoyant environment of the residences in which the interviewees work, we still hear accounts of physical and moral brutality they have had to endure elsewhere from people who are or were close to them. We hear of one woman, for example, whose husband stole money given to her by her father, and who kept her locked up in their slum home, where he forced her to clean other people’s dirty laundry while keeping the proceeds for himself. And about another who, pregnant with triplets, was kicked by her husband until she miscarried, an act so harrowing that it not only ended her marriage, obviously, but turned her off men for life. These are tales of suffering that would probably not have been told in that space under any other circumstances. Yet there are other stories that reveal inequalities that only so-called domestic work can produce and maintain. Narrations that show us, hesitantly – crouching between the yearning to speak and the fear of what will come out if you do – the extent to which those homes, in many ways not only workplaces, but havens against external and often extreme violence, are also environments that generate and renew other forms of suffering. One such case is the maid who was asked to spend three whole months looking after her interviewer’s sick grandmother, without once going to visit her family in her home town. It was a vigil that, by pure misfortune, kept her away from her only son in the months leading up to his tragic death, the victim of a murder. Without betraying any resentment as such, her sad tale does lay bare a feeling of lost time; a sense of life ebbing away without her having any control over how it is used. Something similar emerges from the interviews with another maid who, as a child, had been close friends with her present-day employer. The

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maid was the daughter of the employer’s great-grandfather’s housekeeper, and lived on his farm in the countryside, which the family often visited on holidays. As a young adult, she was invited to move to the big city to work as her former playmate’s housemaid. Of that time of innocent equality she has kept, and shows with a mixture of affection and incredulity, a photo album full of pictures that jar with their present employer-employee relationship, even if there is nothing unusual or strange in that relationship per se. When asked by the interviewer what has changed between her and her old friend (now boss) in the years since her arrival, all she can say, after a long and prudent pause, is that their relationship has “matured” over time.

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There are images and sounds that recur in almost all of the residences in which the interviews take place, suggesting, by repetition, the manners in which these people are inscribed within the world of work. Particularly eloquent in this respect is the number of scenes that testify to the manual nature of housework, for which the employers – with occupations of their own – have neither the time nor the skills set to execute for themselves: washing and ironing, cooking all sorts of food, cleaning the whole house, looking after the pet, doubling as a chauffeur. Almost as a soundtrack, these activities are usually accompanied by a radio playing love songs or religious preaching, sources of solace for lives marked with loss and lack. These are sounds and images that evince a certain social apportioning of chores and aspirations, in which these workers are left with the jobs no-one else wants, but providing assistance others seem to need. The reiteration of these and other aspects of the lives of the maids is clearly fruit of Gabriel Mascaro’s work in the editing room, seeing as it is up to him to cut and bin a sizeable chunk of the raw footage the youngsters provide him with, and which he must weave into a specific tempo whilst extracting a chosen meaning. The precise cuts and sequencing leaves the impression that the director was there all along, overseeing the interviews, but this is a false impression that is engendered by the creative approach he adopts, in which he delegates to others the construction and recording of scenes, but does not relinquish the process of assigning them their meanings. It is these careful choices that best clarify, in the end, what Housemaids’ true aim is: to show domestic employment, so engrained in the Brazilian social fabric, for the form of chronic violence it is, but is rarely perceived to be. However, this is never done stridently, but rather through an accumulation of unassuming sequences and softly-spoken statements – or the silences that precede or follow them – that bring to light centuriesold social inequalities normalized and underscored in practice and law. Housemaids makes no attempt to denounce any possible or even widespread infringements of rights long since afforded to all other labor

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categories, but only recently and partially extended to the domestic worker under Brazilian legislation. At no time does the film descend into lazy or didactic finger-pointing. The true goal of the film is to use the means of filmic construction to lay bare the abidance and reproduction, albeit under the apparent protections of contractual agreement, of a type of relationship whose DNA belongs to a past in which people were starkly hierarchized along the lines of what they did or could do; what they said and could say.

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Housemaids is largely filmed inside the houses or apartments where the interviewers live and the interviewees work. And while the camera focuses primarily on the domestics’ bodies and faces, it inevitably records the surroundings, the rooms, in which they carry out their chores and, in some cases, sleep over, blurring boundaries that are clearly drawn for most workers. The very existence of the so-called ‘maid’s quarters’ in Brazilian homes is a clear indication of the dubious relationship that exists where, in thesis, there should only be a provision of paid services. However, in the case of live-in maids, the sleeping arrangements are such that there is no room for doubt as to their position of extreme subordination vis-à-vis their employers. When compared with other rooms in these homes, the maid’s quarters are invariably and ostensibly far inferior to the rest in terms of ventilation and natural light. These rooms are located in the ‘service area’, a designation that further compounds their status as just one more cog in the inner workings of normal house management. One clear example of this situation is the bedroom allotted to a male domestic, considered a member of the family – he’s been looking after his employers’ daughters since they were little and is invited to Christmas dinner, like a normal relative but who nonetheless sleeps in a tiny room down the back of the yard, near the dogs’ kennels. This paradox is presented and reinforced in the film more by suggestion, through the way the footage is edited, than through any direct attempt at denunciation, seeing as the images were recorded by the daughters themselves, who are too close to and inoculated by the situation to perceive any discrepancy in the distribution of space.2 Likewise, the interviewees do not seem to have a clear notion of the contradiction between their supposed proximity with the family and the standards and architecture that set them so radically apart from it. Quite the contrary, in some cases they express gratitude for the room and shelter they’ve been given. One of the interviewees happily shows the orthopedic mattress and ventilator she received from her employer, while another tells of how her room was renovated and remodeled to accommodate a crib and all the other accessories she’d need to care for her newborn baby. Some of the domestics keep photo albums in their cramped wardrobes – some of which are opened for the benefit of the

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The association between architecture and social fracturing is also presented in Um lugar ao sol (2009), a film which Gabriel Mascaro builds out of depositions from people who live in penthouses.

camera – that include birthday pictures of the sons or daughters of the households they work in, as if they were family mementoes, or, inversely, as if through these pictures they were somehow trying to nurture the illusion that they were part of those families; an illusion clearly debunked by the obvious physical disparities between their respective sleeping quarters, where the architecture reinforces the socially inequitable distribution of space and possibilities.

***

3 See, for example, Santiago (2009), a film by João Moreira Salles in which he looks for the right documentary form through which to narrate the 30-year presence of the butler Santiago in his family home.

However, two particular filmed encounters differ from the five others on some important aspects. In one of these, the domestic’s boss is herself a maid. As she has nobody to leave her disabled son with when she’s away at work, she found herself forced to reproduce and invert in her own home the very relationship to which she is submitted elsewhere. The relative material poverty of her household, clearly visible in the footage, skews our preconceived ideas about the type of residences in which one finds paid domestic labor. The color of the interviewer – darkskinned like the interviewee – helps the film avoid drawing any rigorous associations between occupation and race. However, it must be noted that it was the need to have round-the-clock care for someone with a disability that forced this employer to resort to hired help despite her meagre means, rather than any pursuit of comfort or convenience. It is the exceptional nature of the situation that makes it so relevant to the argument Housemaids proposes. Another singular case among those presented in the film is the one that challenges our gender expectations concerning the domestic worker. In this case, the interviewee is a man, and his position is rendered all the more unusual given the apparently modest nature of the house in which he works, as we tend to associate the hiring of male servants with households of an altogether more affluent order, where they perform the socially more elevated role of butler.3 It is quite revealing, then, that this man was driven into domestic labor by circumstances of personal crisis (we understand he was abandoned by his wife and children), a fact that further reinforces the unwritten rule that – exceptions apart – domestic work in someone else’s home is restricted to women. One way or another, the inclusion of these two interviews helps us remember that there is nothing natural or given about the assignment of roles in domestic employment. The different capacities and occupations described in each episode – characterizing who issues the orders and who obeys them – are highly particular expressions of a major social fracture that does not result from the birthright of some and the misfortune of others, even if it has abided since times immemorial. Recognizing that this unequal arrangement results from the slow-going translation of a colonial, slavery-based tradition into a

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modern system of wage-earning employment also reminds us that it can just as gradually be dismantled to make way for other, fairer forms of social configuration. After all, history is what we make it.

***

Housemaids neither is, nor wants to be, a sociological essay. It is cinema, and it is as cinema that it does politics. Moreover, it only does politics when it activates and renders recognizable, through the images and words it evokes, capacities that could not previously be seen or heard clearly, given their subordinate status. Or, for that matter, when it puts in check associations between people and attributions that were hitherto considered spontaneous or lasting, laying bare their contrived and constructed nature, the fruit of more or less explicit coercions. Housemaids is cinema and it does politics by declaring, in its own terms, the existence of damage and exclusion in a given context of life, making it ethically imperative to integrate into the social corpus those it aggrieves or neglects.4 By creating a sensible equivalent of the reality it addresses, what the film does is represent that reality. It articulates the means and procedures it needs to evoke and unveil an unequal relationship whose terms are all too often omitted or confused, forging an appearance of justice where in fact there is none. Those means are the recording and editing, in sound and images, of the voices and gestures of those who make up that context, and the procedures are those that rally the employers’ own children to interview those who work for their households, thus making it possible to record some of the specificities of domestic employment in Brazil. The result is a documental representation that, as one sample among many possible samples of what actually constitutes this work environment, is also, and to a significant degree, a fictional construct. So, availing of a narrative that is at once true to reality and invented, Housemaids identifies and undoes the anonymity so commonly foisted upon those who work in other people’s houses doing household chores. It renders visible and audible the marks of a social subordination defined not by wagepaying exploitation – in which it is no different from any other formal employment – or even by disrespect for the minimum working conditions theoretically provided for by law. What the film suggests is different about these workers is the subtle subtraction of part of their humanity, no matter how apparently embraced they are by the families that employ them. However, it does not do this through an omniscient discourse that considers itself capable of rallying the viewer against the situation it shows. If Housemaids does indeed want to investigate the ambiguous nature of the relationship between these employees and their employers, it does so while preserving a certain opacity before everything it presents. An opacity that is the way it recognizes the impossibility of translating the other’s words in their entirety; conceding that something always slips through the net when attempting to capture otherness.5 This vague but precise space of

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4 On the relationship between cinema and politics, see Rancière, Jacques. ‘Conversa em torno da fogueira: Straub e alguns outros’. In Rancière, Jacques. As distâncias do cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2012.

Glissant, Édouard. ‘For Opacity’. In Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

6 On the emancipating power of the gaze, see Rancière, Jacques. ‘The Emancipated Spectator’. In Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso, 2009.

understanding is left to the viewer to explore; for the viewer to decide whether or not to be affected by what is offered.6 Housemaids is no accident. It is a chance Gabriel Mascaro takes on building a body of common knowledge that would otherwise not be created.

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Domestic: An indiscreet ethnography by Marco Antonio Gonçalves Marco Antônio lectures on the post-graduate course in Sociology and Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and at the IFCS-UFRJ Department of Cultural Anthropology. He holds a master’s degree and doctorate in Social Anthropology from the post-graduate program at the UFRJ. He did post-doctoral research at the University of St. Andrews (1997), at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (1998) and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2006). He is the author of 12 books, including O real imaginado: etnografia, cinema e surrealismo em Jean Rouch; Devires Imagéticos: a etnografia, o outro e suas imagens; Etnobiografia: subjetividade e etnografia; Darcy Ribeiro: fotógrafo, Indigenista e Antropologo; Traduzir o outro: etnografia e semelhança; Operação Forrock: sobre o nordeste contemporâneo. His areas of research are cosmology, cultural world creation, ethnography and the image and subjectivities. He coordinates the Research Center on Experimentation in Ethnography and the Image (www.nextimagem.com. br) at PPGSA-IFCS-UFRJ. translated by anthony doyle

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‘Domestic’ is a word so engrained in Brazilian culture that anyone attempting to unravel its meaning needs to take a good step back. At first glance, the word refers to anything ‘pertaining to the home, the household or the family’, which, in turn, harks back to the notion of the criado1, someone adopted into and in some way belonging to the family. Domestic also means ‘devoted to home life or to household affairs’, whether on a paid or unpaid basis. Therein, it would seem, lies the great ambiguity of the term: a domestic could be an actual housewife or a ‘hired household servant’. This dichotomy of belonging to the family or not, of inclusion or exclusion, affection or order, leisure or work, help or duty, reveals the spectrum of dilemmas and contradictions that engenders the complex meaning of the word ‘domestic’. It’s a conception allowed to flower in the words with which one of the family filmmakers describes her maid: “She lives here, she works here, she’s one of the family.” All too often this very Brazilian institution of the empregada doméstica (household servant) is seen as deriving from the patriarchal slave society of the 16th century and as being a modern recasting of those same bonds of exploitation. Thankfully, Gabriel Mascaro resists approaching the theme through any sociological narrative that purports to explain social and labor relations in Brazil. Rather he tackles his subject through a mosaic of possibilities, different experiences that enable the viewer to take a closer look at this complex social category. Instead of looking for ‘a’ meaning, the film endeavors to deconstruct the senses customarily assigned to the term by revealing the power it wields within Brazilian society to create meanings. As such, the director does not pick any one sense a priori, but makes room for a fresh conception to emerge from the relations the film itself engenders. Domestic work is not limited to any one social class, nor to either gender, as the film clearly shows, but it evokes a concept that, beyond the subjects that

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1 Portuguese word literally designating someone who is not an actual member of the family but is ‘raised’ within the domestic environment.

embody it, reveals an essential vantage point from which to consider social relations in Brazil. What stands to Housemaids’ merit is that it avoids imposing any explicative framework that might hackney our understanding of these specific labor relations as pertaining to some pre-capitalist form of exploitation. The subjective lens, or ‘indiscreet ethnography’, looks to the subject’s self-mimesis as a way of securing a dense description of these relations, escaping the intrusive eye of some uninvolved other, while opting to reveal the everyday by agency of a camera that simulates a symmetry grounded upon subjectivity: employer and employee are, in filmic truth, characters; a fact that affords the best possible means of understanding this complex relationship. In this case, the indiscretion reveals the participants’ own perception of the construction of cultural systems. The film sheds light on sensitive areas of signification, such as personhood, singularity, the emotions and subjectivities derived therefrom, and their capacities to produce conceptions about what we call ‘social’. By accentuating the detail, the specificity, it underscores the marks of personal experience, which is the raw material par excellence of Housemaids. The indiscreet becomes the discreet, transformed into personal interpretations that render this world apprehensible and conceptualized by subjectivity. Housemaids is therefore a lesson on the importance of the singular, the idiosyncratic, the discreet manners in which cinema builds knowledge of the world and the ways that world can be conceptualized in film. In this sense, the category of the individual is not exactly Housemaids’ frame of reference, a role that falls to individuation as a creative manifestation. After all, it is precisely through personal interpretation that cultural ideas are enabled to access what we call society or culture, a social world that includes both the household owner and the household servant. The device Housemaids employs envisages more than simply footage that focuses on the employers’ take on things, as if intending to convey a perspective, much less does it follow the trend in contemporary film that has placed so much store on ‘personal images’ produced by the filmic subjects. The technique adopted in Housemaids is at the service of a mode of investigation that is the film’s driving force, revealing these household servants through their association with those they look after or have helped to bring up. This aspect would seem to be crucial not only to our understanding of the film, but to our comprehending the institution of domestic servant-hood. The people behind the camera are not the wagepaying employers but their teenage children, with whom the ‘staff’ maintain a radically subjective relationship. It is precisely this subjectivity, and the problematics that go with it, that the film is about. The documentary presents a complex web of delicate relations grasped from this crucial point, this node of subjectivity, a quality that invites us to reflect on the way Brazilians build their sociability: somewhere between the close and the distant; the cordial

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and the violent; equality and hierarchy; help and exploitation; obedience and command. As such, Housemaids’ subjective camera, its minimalism, captures a deep-set and complex dimension of a social bond. By deploying subjectivity as a device it allows us to understand appropriately the phenomenon that is the ‘domestic worker’ and how it has stood through the centuries as a pillar of Brazilian society. However, how do you approach a theme so easily caricatured along the lines of exploitation and servility? The only possibility is to go straight to its core: to the level of subjectivity whence it derives, on which it congeals and hardens as a bedrock social form. We evoke here the paradox experienced by Joaquim Nabuco, the great abolitionist, who, upon eliminating slavery, confessed that he ‘missed the slave’, thus indicating the ‘protective’, ‘emotional’ and eminently subjective bond that forged this most Brazilian of social relations. Affection, care, attention and assistance are what underpin the employer-employee relations that emerge from the affection-reciprocityinequality trinomial (Cf. Velho, 2012, p.20; Buarque de Holanda, 1936; Freyre, 1933, 1936). Let us look, more closely, at some of these characters. Vavá, Vanuza, has been a driver and domestic with Neto’s family for 17 years now. In his attempts to get to know her better, Neto goes into her room and looks inside her wardrobe, where he finds a heart-shaped box and a book she’s been reading to help her cope with her son’s drug habit. Neto formulates his questions in a delicate manner, and seems to enjoy the opportunity the camera is giving him to discover who Vavá is, to see her in a new light, inverting the relationship of care and attention. The Narcissuslike blindness of a supposed exploitative violence is broken by the camera, which switches the focus back onto the domestic; onto her story, her world. The camera now becomes the pedagogy that allows us to learn about the other: it is now the domestic who is center-stage, talking about her employers and being talked about in return. The camera enables this knowledge. Those attempting to know the domestics are their employers’ children, and it is through their lens that the viewer, too, becomes an accomplice in this learning process, irremediably reminded of his/her own experience with domestics. On the other hand, the camera and the position Neto assumes behind it enable Vanuza to reveal herself, express her emotions, understand herself through the subjective nature of the relationship developed with her employers: she hears a poem on the radio and recites its verses along with the announcer; she speaks to her son on the phone, explaining to him why she’s left him keyless and locked inside their house; for a moment, before she starts stacking bath towels in a cupboard, she thinks about her son and is overcome with emotion; while chauffeuring, she says she finds driving “chic”; she talks about her break-up with her husband, who she refers to only as “the father of my children”; she says her husband cheated on her all throughout their 24-year marriage; she sings a love song about being alone,

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2 The word she uses is ‘judiada’, an expression used colloquially to mean ‘caused great suffering’, but which literally translates as ‘treated like a Jew’.

and, aware that the camera is still running, starts to sing in full voice about how hard it is to find requited love. The inversion of perspective that comes of turning the camera onto the domestics is poetically underscored when we see one of the teenagers fixing her hair in the reflection on the lens before starting her interview. This ‘turning of the camera’ toward the domestic encompasses a ritual gesture that triggers new meanings and inverts perspectives, as the youths learn more about the ‘hired help’, their life stories, disillusionments, dreams. The most striking revelation of this power is when the maid takes part in a Jewish ceremony, the shabbat. As the father speaks in Hebrew, his teenage daughter explains the ritual of the loaves, which must remain covered so as not to become jealous of the wine. The maid eats from the bread she prepared herself for the ritual. We later learn that she is there because of a dream she confided in the girl, in which she saw herself taking part. Her dream becomes reality before the camera, and there she is, sitting among the family and savoring the bread and the wine. Continuing in the same tone of role-reversal, the girl asks the maid how she’d imagined Jews to be before she came to work for them. Buoyed by being the center of attention, she answers candidly: “I thought they were bad people... I’d already worked for some Jews and been really mistreated.”2 She goes on to say that, in the beginning, she hadn’t liked the food in the house, which she’d thought too light, not hearty enough, but that she’d got used to it and now quite likes it. It is interesting to note this aspect of ‘getting used to’, as it conveys the transformation the domestic must undergo when joining a new ‘family’. The new inhabitant must habituate, the new addition must familiarize – become accustomed, change tastes, modify her way of understanding the world. However, this transformation is two-way: at the same time as she is ‘domesticated’, or adapted to the home, she also becomes ‘staff’, that is, she becomes a pillar, a prop, a stay of that same home. A domestic with a towel on her head is dancing and singing to some reggae music when the employer comes into the sitting room and asks her to turn the sound down. At another time, she is seen sweeping beneath the sofa, dusting and tidying up in the middle of the night. The maid has gone nocturnal, working while the household sleeps. This block reveals the complicity between the filmer and the filmed, an intimacy that brings out the best in this character, at once outgoing and vibrant, but also sad and tragic. Her speech is laced with humor and violence, abnegation and critical energy. She has worked for the family for 13 years and says that she has spent more time in her employer’s house than with her own mother. She says she went three whole months without taking a day off while looking after the girl’s grandmother, a period she had no way of knowing would be the last months of her son’s life, before his tragic murder. She complains, cries, and says that she felt robbed by her work. She opens her room to the camera, shows the orthopedic mattress she sleeps on and the ventilator she was given by the boss, and she says she feels at home there.

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Feeling at home, growing accustomed, becoming part are recurrent turns of phrase with these domestics; ambiguous propositions that evoke the domain of irony, figures of speech that accentuate the power relations whilst mitigating the ‘domestication’. This irony and domestication are present in the quarters Lena presents as the “master suite”. Lena is her charge’s confidant, her son has grown up there, she is part of the family, and yet – underscoring the ambiguity of the relationship – her employer says of her: “Lena won’t be here forever, if our own kids won’t be here forever, what, then, of the help...” On the outskirts of São Paulo, a black girl named Bia is looked after by Flávia, who is a domestic’s domestic. This block brings to light a paradox that captures all the contradictions of this complex definition of what it means to be a housemaid in Brazilian society. Flávia and Bia play on the sofa while listening to the radio. Flávia tells Bia her story: her husband was cheating on her with a prostitute. She’s suffered a lot in this life. Pregnant with triplets, her husband beat her and she lost the babies. He started kicking her in the stomach, she hemorrhaged on the spot, developed a fever, fainted from the pain and woke up in hospital. After that, she never wanted to even hear of a man again. She says her boss (who is also a domestic) is a good woman: “She complains when things aren’t to her liking, but she helps me a lot.” She does a star turn; grabs her cellphone as if it were a mic and starts performing for the camera and the kids. Jennifer, 16, is at high school, does theater classes and says she has her “guardian angel” to look after her. The angel in question is a male maid, who we first see cleaning dog dirt in the yard, emptying the bathroom waste baskets, and washing the dishes. Jennifer, behind the camera, tells us of how he came to work with them during a rough phase, just after breaking up with his wife. It was a sad story: “Mom saw it all and invited him to come work for us, to look after me,” she says. “He keeps to himself, stays in a world of his own.” Christmas. The male domestic is there at the family commemorations. Hugs, kisses and celebrations all round. Sérgio serves himself a plate and withdraws to eat on the veranda. In this block, the notion of the domestic takes another turn: here it’s a man, a “guardian angel”, who tends to the house. A teen tells his maid that he’s going to make a documentary about her life and asks her to sign an authorization form. “Is that alright?”, he asks. The maid says yes, signs the form and goes back to drying the dishes. The boss comes into the kitchen and asks for a recap on a missed episode of the latest soap opera. She sits at the table and asks for a fork, stressing the “please”. The boss says she’s known Lucimar since she was born, because she’s the daughter of her great-grandfather’s housekeeper. We see photos of little Lucimar and her boss holding hands as kids, then some more of the two girls playing together on the farm. The boss says that whenever she spent the holidays in Valença the first thing she’d do was go play with

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Lucimar, and that she could never have imagined that she’d be her domestic one day. She says it was tough at first; that she’d found it hard establishing a boss-maid relationship with someone she’d always considered a friend. The son asks Lucimar how old she was when she started working. Fourteen, she says, by which stage she already knew how to cook, clean and iron. Lucimar is shy. The boy asks what she feels she does best. She says she bakes a mean cake, and smiles. He asks if she likes wearing the maid’s uniform and she says that she does. “Don’t you feel uncomfortable out in the streets like that?” “No, no I don’t,” she answers. “Did things change between you and my mom after you came to work here, after years of friendship?” Lucimar pauses, then says that their relationship has matured over the years, adding that it has given her the chance to be in Rio de Janeiro, where she feels she has freedom, and she likes that. She looks through the photo album, shyly smiling at the pictures of her and her friend-turned-boss. The camera focuses on photos of the two children, now employer and employee. Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ starts to play, and it sums up the meaning ‘domestic’ holds for Brazilian society: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.” References Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio. Raízes do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1936. Freyre, Gilberto. Casa grande e senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarcal. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1933. Freyre, Gilberto. Sobrados e mucambos: Decadência do patriarcado rural e desenvolvimento urbano. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1936. Velho, Gilberto. ‘O patrão e as empregadas domésticas’. Sociologia, problemas e práticas, no. 69, 2012, pp.13-30.

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III. ‘housemaids’, a feminine noun 77

Domestic employment in Brazil: Unequal affections and the interfaces of class, race and gender by Marta Rodriguez de Assis Machado and Márcia Lima Marta Rodriguez de Assis Machado holds a master’s degree and doctorate in General Theory and Philosophy of Law from the Universidade de São Paulo. She lectures at the Fundação Getulio Vargas Faculty of Law in São Paulo, where she also coordinates the Center for Studies on Crime and Punishment. She is a CEBRAP (Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning) researcher whose main areas of study are crime, criminal responsibility, punishment and the relationships between social movements and law, particularly concerning issues of race and gender. Márcia Lima is a lecturer in Sociology at the Universidade de São Paulo. She is an associate senior researcher with CEBRAP (Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning) and CEM (Metropolitan Studies Center), where she is involved in projects linked to CEPID-FAPESP (Center for Research, Innovation and Diffusion) and to the CNPq/MCT Program (National Metropolitan Studies Institute). She has experience in Sociology, with emphasis on the study of inequality, having published and supervised publications on the following themes: the jobs market, occupational arcs, racial and gender inequality, and affirmative action policy for third-level education. this article was produced as part of an open call organized in partnership with myrdle court press (www.myrdlecourtpress.net) and the federal university of pernambuco (www. ufpe.br). the article was also published in the online magazine aquitextos (vitruvius).

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Writing about the documentary Housemaids is no easy task. Full of tough stories of poverty, solitude, violence and prejudice of every kind, it encapsulates a great many of Brazil’s social problems and lays its theme before the viewer in all the complexity it demands. At the same time, these issues come wrapped in relationships of proximity and affection that are very familiar to the viewer. In this paper, we will focus on just a few of the issues the documentary raises in order to draw out elements that mark the specificity of the subaltern nature of domestic labor, and which, as we see it, indicate the challenges that need to be faced in dealing with the social problems this particular work environment entails. We do not intend to analyze the film itself – a task that would require far more qualified authors than we – but simply to address some of the challenges it poses, considering the meaning of domestic employment in Brazilian society and the different perceptions it presents of the employeremployee relationship. Furthermore, broaching the subject of domestic work in Brazil means also considering the multiple facets and ambiguities of the Gordian knot formed by the three main pillars of Brazilian inequality: class, race and gender. 1. Domestic employment and its (lack of) value

The provision of domestic services is historically recognized as the lowliest category in the jobs market, being low-paid, informal, uncovered labor that largely draws people with very little formal education. According to the 2010 census, there are almost five million domestic employees in Brazil. Historically, it’s an occupation that has always been numerous here, and, despite a gradual and continuing decrease, the category still accounts for 6% of the national workforce. Domestic workers tend to

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We use the expression ‘in most cases’ because of the silence of Lena, who is raising her daughter, Fernanda, under her boss’s roof and is considered by her something of ‘an older sister’. Her life story is reconstructed by the teenager and her mother. We will speak more about this throughout the text.

have little formal education (60% did not finish primary school), be predominantly black (61.6%) and almost exclusively female (94.4%). A quarter of this workforce is active in the northeast, while almost half (47%) is concentrated in the southeast. The data only makes sense if looked at in the light of a series of issues surrounding class, race and gender, and the historical and social effects they have had on black women in particular, the overwhelming majority in this line of work. The effects of this articulation are of two orders: the first concerns the production of a subaltern class and the social ills that accompany its concrete living conditions; and the second pertains to the field of social representations and the construction of an image of subservience, associated with both the low value assigned to domestic work – an activity overwhelmingly associated with women – and its persistence as a throwback to slavery. As such, analyzing domestic work is no simple matter and needs to take into account all of these dimensions: exploitation of labor, and its material and symbolic relations with racial and gender inequalities. The richness of the film lies in the way it reveals these in all their rawness and complexity. Story after story, a pattern emerges that characterizes domestic employment in Brazil, specifically for one figure who predominates in the film: the live-in maid. It is this category that evinces the most problematic issues surrounding domestic labor, as we see from their invariably precarious living conditions, in tiny rooms, with neither privacy nor windows – hence Gracinha’s (unwitting) irony when she celebrates the orthopedic mattress and ventilator received as ‘gifts’ from her employer. What strikes the viewer is these women’s lack of contact with their own families and children, their low self-esteem, their isolation and invisibility – reflected, for example, in Dilma’s dream-come-true of being allowed to participate in a dinner with her Jewish family, and the countless other life stories that would otherwise have remained hidden were it not for the circumstances created by the film (which, interestingly, testifies to the documentary process as a mechanism of transformation and recognition). The film allows something rare to occur: in most cases, though the ‘little bosses’ hold the camera, the domestics are ‘given’ the floor,1 bringing the issue of self-representation into the foreground. If we look at the accounts these domestic workers give (similar in many respects to those contained in earlier studies on household employment), we see that their selfrepresentations are still strongly influenced by the social construction of a very specific subordination in relation to the family. One thing that calls attention is the way the live-in maids refer to their own personal lives as a thing of the past – “before coming here” – or as something to be managed from a distance. These are sad stories of people, especially the mothers among them, who are kept away from their homes and families. Some elements of the film are typically Brazilian. For example, the blaring social inequality, translated by the sequence of houses spanning the full social spectrum and evincing the brutal disparity of incomes, properties

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and life styles. Urban violence, which mostly affects the black poor, and is a constant specter hanging over the film, reaches tragic proportions in the stories of Gracinha, whose son was murdered during a period of a few months in which she was unable to get home, and Vanuza, whose son is a drug addict. And all of this harks back to a slave-owning past, as we shall see further on. In this quintessentially Brazilian context, the film draws out a core feature of live-in domestic employment, namely a blurring of boundaries between workplace and home; between public and private; between the employeremployee relationship and the formation of bonds of affection on such an unequal footing. These elements, which are so evident in the film, are part of the structure of domestic employment, and that is what makes these relationships so fatally unfair. The domestic’s workplace is also his/her dwelling, which means the worker, always on-site, is always on-call. Conversely, the fact that the domestic’s workplace is the employer’s home implies a high level of personal involvement, a clouding of the professional and personal. Furthermore, the aspect of care inherent to domestic work – looking after the house, the kids, the meals – ends up introducing bonds of affection that confuse the situation and install ambiguities. The problem with this is that it puts the domestic in a disadvantaged position in which she is susceptible to abuse, exploitation, unpaid overtime and lengthy periods without rest days or holidays. The ‘she’s practically part of the family’ logic is dangerous insofar as the ‘practically’ draws the worker into a realm of affection that allows the employer to make excessive and often unpaid demands on her time. The contractual side to her presence in the home is eclipsed by euphemisms (example: “she lives here and helps out round the house”), obscuring the fact that the worker has her own home and personal interests, and that along with her subordination comes a series of rights provided for in law. It is precisely at times when one of the parties finds itself on weaker ground that rights come into play, whether in protecting against abuses or transmitting messages that redress contaminated standards and (re)draw the boundaries. It was only to be expected, therefore, that paid overtime and weekly rest days were controversial points when it came to debating Constitutional Amendment 72, which put domestic employees on an equal footing with all other urban and rural workers. In other words, what these norms ruptured was a naturalized logic of abuse that had become so ingrained it stirred no shame or guilt. As one example among many of opposition to the new regulations we might mention the comments of the Folha de S. Paulo columnist and Rio socialite Danuza Leão, who evoked a friend’s right to ask for tea at 10 o’clock at night.2 Another controversial aspect of the new legislation involved the contention that it would make it more expensive to hire a domestic and therefore raised the possibility of there being widespread lay-offs. The amendment not only set a minimum wage for domestic employees, but also ensured social security deposits, as in any other formal employment. These

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2 See: ‘O medo, o luxo e a PEC’. Published on April 14, 2013. Available at: http://arquivoetc. blogspot.com. br/2013/04/o-medo-oluxo-pec-danuza-leao. html.

Decree of Law 71,885, 1973, on domestic employment, approving Law 5,589, 1972.

According to the Labor Ministry: “Under Constitutional Amendment nº 72, passed into Law on April 02, 2013, the following rights were extended to domestic employees: protection against unwarranted or arbitrary dismissal; unemployment benefit; Guarantee Fund payments; higher night-time rates of pay; overtime pay; family wage; fixed working hours; reduced job-related risks; free assistance for children and dependents; recognition of all relevant conventions and collective accords; insurance against workplace accidents; prohibition of any form discrimination; pay parity; prohibition of night shifts, and of dangerous or unhealthy work for under 18s.” Domestic Worker’s Handbook, 2013, p.6. Seven of these rights still require regulation before coming into effect.

arguments, tellingly similar to those leveled against Abolition (what would become of freed slaves, sent homeless and jobless into the world?), grossly undervalue domestic labor. While none of the families can imagine living without their maids – “she’s been here for as long as I can remember,” says one of the teenagers – nobody is prepared to pay much for the privilege. These representations of domestic work help explain the great resistance faced by the proposal to confer upon the domestic employee the same rights as any other urban or rural worker.3 The constitutional amendment approved by the Senate in March 2013 did nothing more than extend 16 basic worker’s rights to a class hitherto unjustly deprived of them.4 It is important to remember that this extension of rights occurred within a context in which their effective implementation faced enormous challenges. The census data throws up some alarming figures for informality in the sector: only 34.2% of domestic workers in Brazil were registered employees in 2010. In other words, though domestic workers already had some rights before the constitutional amendment, these were not respected in virtue of widespread informality. This continues to be the biggest challenge facing the wholesale implementation and enforcement of the constitutional amendment. 2. Lady Sisyphus, barely recognized and badly paid

Getting back to the matter of attributed value, there are two key elements to consider when reflecting on the reasons for the lack of it. The first of these is rooted in a model of male domination: domestic work is not only exhausting, undervalued and often unpaid, but is also seen as restricted to women. In addition to the material shortfalls, we can factor in a symbolic devaluation and its corrosive effect on self-esteem. As Simone de Beauvoir said, few tasks more closely resemble Sisyphean torture than housework, with its endless repetition: by the time everything has been cleaned you have to go back and start all over again, day after day. And besides being exhausting and unending, domestic work is always considered bereft of any greater intellectual or productive meaning or refinement. It therefore becomes subject to the body/intellect divide at the heart of capitalist exploitation (and of so many of the castrations and miseries of contemporary society, but that’s a matter for another paper). One specific contribution made by casting domestic labor in a masculine mold of domination is that it occupies women’s time with unpaid service, lashing them into ties of economic dependence and public and political occlusion. For this very reason, women’s struggle for emancipation came allied with a discussion about time and work. If women entered the jobs market, how were they to keep up with their responsibilities both inside and outside the home? In a country like Brazil, the answer was simple: hire a domestic and a nanny. In Brazil, as in various other patriarchal nations, women joining the jobs market did not come with a redistribution of home and child care. In

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other words, the emergence of the domestic worker was key to the financial and professional emancipation of women. The sad part – from the perspective of human relationships, but also of the feminist struggle – is that women have long failed to discern and appreciate that role. The film is full of elements that illustrate this lack of recognition and the patent reinforcement of female submission to a male-oriented model by other women (except, for obvious reasons, in the case of the domestic’s domestic), not to mention a general male absence, and all that means. The teenagers aside, only the women of the house deal with the domestics, so even when delegated to someone else, house management continues to be a women’s affair. The confirmation of this gender rule is clear in the case of the only male maid in the film. Sérgio became a domestic because he’d failed as a man: unable to provide for his family, he ended up divorced and living in the home where he worked. His bearing is clearly that of a person humiliated, whose self-esteem has been crushed. Housework is the last and unedifying resort of a defeated man who has failed as a breadwinner. Sérgio – also a victim of the stereotypes of a chauvinistic society – may be surprised to know that the domestic is actually the provider par-excellence of poor households throughout Brazil. However, to continue our reflection on the devaluation of this class of worker we must move beyond the issue of gender and consider the vestiges of slavery. 3. Representations of race and class

Another relevant aspect of the way domestic work is represented in Brazil concerns race. As mentioned earlier, according to Census data from 2010, 61.6% of the country’s domestics are black. The predominance of AfroBrazilians in domestic employment has been the subject of various sociological studies that show that domestic work is an icon of the Gordian knot formed by race, class and gender in Brazil. It is impossible to speak about this subject without revisiting the work of Gilberto Freyre, whose qualification of race relations created, in nearmythic tone, the figure of the slave-woman, followed by the chambermaid, and her significance in Brazilian society. The enslavement of black women entailed more than toil in the home or in the fields, but also a range of female ‘duties’: black nursemaids breast-fed the babies of the manor, satisfied the sexual urges of the master, and ensured the sexual initiation of his sons. Though this theme does not arise in the film, the Freyrean representation of the domestic is still deeply engrained in the Brazilian social imagination. In TV soaps, for example, the maid, almost always black, is either a dutiful servant with no life of her own outside the ‘family’ (the stock ‘sinhama’5), or, in the case of the younger women, a sexual tease harassed by the employer’s husband. In this sense, color, gender and pay-grade conspire to create an utter subaltern. The culture of domestic employment in Brazil is rife with

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5 Sinhama is a combination of two Portuguese words: sinhá and ama. Sinhá means Senhora (lady), but specifically black ladies. Amas were those women who worked as nannies of white children. In Brazil, during slavery, black amas also breastfed white babies. Sinhamas were generally middle-aged black women who worked inside their bosses’ (or owners’) houses.

these throwbacks to slavery. The domestic is a thing at the employer’s beckand-call on two different but overlapping levels: as a woman and as a Negro. The importance attributed to the maid’s quarters in the film is a strong reference to the specificity of the social and racial rungs on which employer and employee belong beneath the same roof. However, the employer’s social class impacts significantly on the construction of these relations – and this is made clear in the film. The use of a uniform, the way the kids talk about the relationship, the presence of the mother in the home, all of this varies considerably depending on the family’s social class. The distance tends to be greater the richer the employers, and the relationships closer among the less well-off. This is particularly apparent in the way Flávia, whose boss is also a maid, looks after the kids in her care. Middle-class families tend to have a more ambiguous relationship with their domestic help. Two cases, those of Lucimar and Lena, warrant particular attention. Both women come from rural backgrounds. In fact, this is something many of them share, as domestic employment seems to be an obvious alternative for (im)migrant women, adding a further aspect of dependence. As migrants (mostly from the northeast) or immigrants (usually from North America, Europe and Asia), they end up depending on their job for accommodation. Both Lucimar and Lena came from an already existing subaltern position vis-à-vis their employer’s family, which ended up translating into an urban environment. For Lucimar, a childhood “friend” of her boss, the construction of a hierarchical relationship was a difficult process, with undercurrents of conflict. The employer says that “in the beginning, the hardest part was establishing myself as a boss”; a process Lucimar describes as the relationship “maturing”. In wisely resigned tone, Lucimar seems to be saying that she learned, with maturity, exactly what her place was in society, as a black woman from a poor background. It’s a clear instance of how the emancipatory potential of affection is dampened by hierarchy. The intricate dimensions of the subaltern nature of domestic employment are also laid bare in the case of Lena. Here, the boss is extremely caring in the way she looks after Lena’s baby daughter, Fernanda, and even weeps at the prospect of their leaving some day, but Lena’s silence as her employers (mother and teenage daughter) take it upon themselves to tell her story for her casts doubt over the apparent harmony. In the end, what prevails is a sense of awkwardness: Lena cleaning the house while the boss plays at ‘mothering’ her baby daughter. The child is welcome in the workplace, but it becomes clear that the employer’s obvious affection for the maid’s baby masks yet another case of a black mother being deprived of her right to raise and enjoy her own kids. 4. Seed doubt and let the wind take the question

Each of the cases dealt with in the film deserves a lot more space than we can give here. What we would like to underscore is that all of the

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relationships shown in the film are compositions spun of race, gender and class. Most of the domestics are black or mestizo while the employers are largely white. One exception is the employer who is herself a maid and, judging by the color of her children, probably black too. Another is a man who carries his servant-hood as a constant humiliation. This is precisely what lends complexity to the social problem before us: while the protection of law provides a safety net against abuse, the real emancipation of the domestic worker depends on the struggle for genuine equality – both material and symbolic – in terms of race, gender and class. If domestic work is a field in which all of these inequalities and injustices converge, then perhaps we can envisage a reversal from that point of intersection. The fact that what we are dealing with here is also a field of affections reminds us that not all of its facets are perverse. Despite the inherently unequal standing in which not everyone can see the injustice of the status quo or the suffering it causes, the humanization of relations always carries the potential to render inequalities inexplicable. Yet the issue cannot be consigned to the private sphere alone – in fact, that’s one of the reasons why this inequality persists in the first place: the confinement of domestic issues, whether of gender or race, behind closed doors. For a long time, all of these issues were restricted to a private, depoliticized sphere, hence the importance of this documentary: by bringing them to light and raising them for public discussion, the film contains a seed of change. Furthermore, the director’s decision to focus on the teenagers’ perspective draws attention to an important aspect of class relations: change over time. What would this documentary have been like if made in the 1980s or 90s? Would it have caused such discomfort? Why is it that the decades-old demands for equitable treatment have only now been answered in a constitutional amendment? We end this text by recalling the unease of young Luiz Felipe, who manages to see around the filter of naturalizations that rose-tint the injustice inherent to the idea that domestic work is lesser work, and poses the question: “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”

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She does the same thing everyday: Women and domestic work by Francielle Jordânia Francielle Jordânia, 29, is the mother of Marina, aged 1 ½. She studied Literature for two years at the Universidade de São Paulo, but interrupted her course in order to move to Montevideo, Uruguay, where she has lived for the last three years. Today, in addition to looking after her daughter and tending to the home, she studies Agronomic Engineering at the Agronomy Faculty of Universidad de La República. translated by anthony doyle

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There’s an old world to destroy, and a whole new one to build. But we’re going to do it, young friends, aren’t we?

rosa luxemburg House management and domestic chores

Many women spend much of their lives engaged in household chores, which often includes tending to small children and/or the elderly. Heirs to a paternalistic social tradition that relegates women to the domestic sphere, even today it is difficult to break with the structure that conditions us, or at least nudges us in this direction. That would not be a serious problem in itself were it actually a question of women choosing that line of work – for which, incidentally, there is no professional qualification. Even as little girls, we are told that housework is women’s work, that all the chores essential to the maintenance of the home, from washing, cleaning and tidying to ironing and cooking – with or without the help of household appliances – will be a fixture of our daily lives. Our engagement in this kind of work – which can take six, eight, even ten hours a day – ends up curtailing our participation in other social spheres. Busy at housework, we find ourselves deprived of certain fundamental rights, such as access to education, culture, information and leisure. One of the characteristics of housework is that it doesn’t come in measured daily shifts, so its open-endedness frequently eats into and renders unquantifiable the time we can devote to rest and relaxation. Unlike many other lines of work, domestic labor implies doing the same chores day in, day out. What’s more, as the work is done inside the home, there is little or no social interaction involved. A corollary of this is a lack of social recognition of the fact that we are actually working at all. The housewife is unpaid and therefore non-taxpaying, which means she receives no pension or benefits for years of service.

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Working outside of the home

Report published on 09/01/2013 at: http://g1.globo.com/ concursos-e-emprego/ noticia/2013/01/brasiltem-o-maior-numero-dedomesticas-do-mundodiz-oit.html. Accessed 23/02/2014.

According to data on the website: https:// www.domesticalegal. com.br/conteudo/ utilidades/salariominimo-sao-paulo.aspx. Accessed 23/02/2014.

Facing the need to supplement family incomes, many women find themselves having to seek formal employment as well, very often as domestics, cleaners, housekeepers, cooks, kitchen staff, and so on; in other words, in functions that are extensions of the same household chores. However, two aspects warrant attention here: 1) Even when the proletariat woman, if we can call her that, works outside the home, she is still doing much the same work as she would do in the home. (Isn’t that a double shift?) 2) Middle-class women, who tend to have access to a wider range of professional options, and so can pursue other and better-paid professional occupations, often have to ‘emancipate’ themselves from household work by outsourcing these chores to other women – women from a less economically privileged position willing to receive low wages for ‘unqualified’ labor. So what we have here is a subdivision resulting from the specialization of female labor: on the one hand, qualified women valued on the jobs market, in other words, those who have completed secondary, complementary or third-level education, and, on the other, women specializing in domestic services (cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, etc). Excluded from the professional qualifications that would open a wider range of professional possibilities, the proletariat woman goes out to work as a housekeeper and comes back home to do the same chores all over again as a housewife. According to a report published by G1 in São Paulo1, a study conducted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that “Brazil has the largest number of domestic workers in the world”. ILO statistics showed that 17% of working Brazilian women, a contingent of 6.7 million, are domestics. For Sandra Polaski, Deputy Director General for Policy at the ILO: “Domestic workers are frequently expected to work longer hours than other workers and in many countries do not have the same rights to weekly rest that are enjoyed by other workers. Combined with the lack of rights, the extreme dependency on an employer and the isolated and unprotected nature of domestic work can render them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.” In January 2014, the average monthly wage for a registered domestic worker in São Paulo was R$810 (324 USD). Four years earlier it was only R$510 (204 USD).2 Gender inequality

The higher value attributed to male labor on the jobs market (with fixed working hours and salary) and the greater social recognition afforded to men as a category of worker result in discrimination against working women, especially the housewife, whose work is not credited as such, generates no direct income (or benefits in-kind) and therefore consolidates her economic dependency on men. In addition, the fact that she has no fixed working hours means her labor impinges on her right to rest and holiday time.

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The differing levels of recognition afforded to working men and women and the economic dependency of women upon men generated by this structure can result in relationships of oppression, subordination and, in many cases, aggression (verbal, psychological, moral and physical); factors that certainly help consolidate a social profile of women as subaltern, servile, lacking in confidence and generally undermined. Female subjectivity and potential in the broader sense of full development are also compromised by this. The degree to which we see the role of women as social subjects and their work as the fruit of social production is inevitably measured against the male role as social individual. The subjectivity of one is constructed in parallel with, and as a counterweight to, the other. In order for there to be an effective change in the woman’s role within the domestic environment and the freedoms that go with it, there must first be an equitable division of domestic labor. A change of values – such as the opinion that housework is woman’s work – is essential, as such tasks can and should be divided equally among all the members of a household. This is a shift that drives and encourages men to take on their share of the household chores. Inversely, it also means that those who find themselves socially forced into the role of ‘breadwinner’ will also have the chance to become involved in house management and child rearing, taking some of the pressure off women in the process. The woman, in turn, will have more time and more favorable subjective conditions with which to consider a life outside the domestic sphere, finally finding herself in a position to take a job outside the home – without this implying a double shift – and to dedicate herself to personal development and projects. The creation of public policies that recognize the rights and freedoms of women is part of the process of female emancipation, first and foremost, but also, and consequently, of society as a whole, enhancing not just quality of life for women, but general social well-being. However, policy and legislation alone cannot deconstruct the prevailing social structure and implant a new set of values. As men and women who help construct and reproduce social values, and as individual agents of change, albeit in limited social spheres, we all share the responsibility to strive to re-signify and transform these unequal relations in our daily lives.

— Since around the age of eight, when I was living with my grandmother and uncles, I remember there was a lot of pressure at home for me to start taking on household chores, especially because my grandmother, who was experiencing the wear of age, had to be relieved of some of the burden. But why couldn’t the men also do their share? Because of this, I grew up thinking this division of domestic labor was normal. I therefore internalized the pressure to meet this demand, and it grew as I saw my young friends start to experience the same oppressive expectation.

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IV. out of shot: unequal spaces in the house and the city 91

A burdened colonial legacy: Domestic servitude in Brazilian literature and culture by Sônia Roncador Sônia Roncador is Associate Professor at the Departament of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas, Austin. Since completing her doctorate at New York University, she has published three books: Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil (1889-1999) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), A doméstica Imaginária: literatura, testemunhos, e a invenção da empregada doméstica no Brasil (1889-1999) (Editora Universidade de Brasília, 2008) and Poéticas do empobrecimento: a escrita derradeira de Clarice Lispector (Annablume, 2002). Her new research project explores the juxtapositions between discourses on immigration and slavery demonstrating the varied intersections of Portuguese and African Diasporas in Brazil.

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Since the approval of Constitutional Amendment 66/2012 (widely known as the PEC das domésticas), which granted household workers the same labor rights as other professional groups, Brazilian domestic servants have undeniably gained symbolic relevance in the national, and even international, news media. However, such an unprecedented expansion of the domestic service labor code would have made a bigger impact on maids’ legal empowerment were it not attenuated by a culture of informality – namely a lack of work contracts – that has long plagued domestic service in Brazil. Indeed, thanks to the high number of un-contracted maids, nearly half of Brazil’s 6.6 million domestic workers remain excluded from legal protection. In addition, the recent wave of widespread dismissals of maids, coupled with employers’ public protests evoking the supposed inviolability of the home, reveal elite Brazilians’ ongoing attempts to use domestic service to preserve longstanding social, racial and gender divisions in Brazil. My main goal as a scholar of the cultural imaginary of domestic servants in Brazilian literature is essentially to explore the ways national elites have attempted to reconcile the colonial legacy of domestic servitude with their aspirations to modernity. As early as the mid-19th century, new rules of domestic cross-social/racial management entered the elite households through the popularity of ‘how-to’ housekeeping handbooks and novels (mostly in the form of newspaper folhetins or serials), primarily focused on initiating women from the middle and upper social sectors into the premises of bourgeois domesticity. Updating the abusive and idle mistress model for the sake of promoting the cordial, industrious and above all exemplary ‘domestic woman’, this 19th-century conduct literature sought to equip mistresses with managerial skills in order for them to maintain their authority and control over their servants in the face of the gradual demise of domestic slavery.1 Additionally, as servants were seen as increasingly more powerful in

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1 As Nancy Armstrong’s analysis of late 18th to 19th-century female conduct literature reveals, a new kind of woman, ‘a domestic woman’, was then emerging as the feminine ideal model men should desire to marry; a model no longer based on the appeals of the aristocracy’s economic and politic powers, but on the values and interests of the middle ranks of society. According to this literature, it was the bourgeois domestic woman, “and not her aristocratic counterpart, who ensured a man the sanctity and gratification of private life” (The Ideology of Conduct, p. 9). These modern conduct books, Armstrong goes on to say, “propose a curriculum they claim is capable of producing a woman whose value resides chiefly in her femininity rather than in traditional signs of status, a woman possessing psychological depth rather than a physically attractive surface, one who, in other words, excels in the qualities that differentiate her from the male rather than in terms of her father’s wealth and title” (my emphasis; p.10).

2 For more on the relevance of domestic servitude in Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s fictional and non-fictional works, see my journal articles: ‘As criadas de Júlia’ (in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies); ‘O demônio familiar: lavadeiras, amasde-leite e criadas na narrativa de Júlia Lopes de Almeida (in LusoBrazilian Review); as well as my book chapter ‘Júlia’s Maids: Servants in the Cultural Imaginary of the Tropical Belle Époque’ (in Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889-1999).

the aftermath of slavery abolition (1888), further strategies emerged to initiate elite women into the challenging ‘art’ of exerting cross-racial governability. Upon the institutionalization of paid domestic work, which blurred the “conceptual divide between family and work, custom and contract, affection and duty” (Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum, Cultures of Servitude, p.3), employing families were at the very least uncomfortable in the face of the widely anticipated rising class of highly demanding and selfish servants. In spite of their social marginalization, servants have systematically entered the nation’s main forums of elaboration of socio-racial/gender power relations and boundaries at specific, politically unstable moments when such established power dynamics were perceived as in jeopardy. Not surprisingly, it is precisely during the transition from slaved to ‘free’ service that the servant class gained unprecedented symbolic centrality in a wide spectrum of discourses, including state-commissioned studies and criminal reports, medical and ethnographic theses, journalism, domestic manuals and fiction. I contend that the so-called ‘servant problem’ (namely, the dearth of dependable servants) emerged in national public discourses during the years leading to abolition, or more precisely, when empowered families began to fear the shattering of the long-established “pact of protection and obedience” (Sandra L. Graham, House and Street, p.8) which had thus far fashioned master-slave relations in colonial and 19th-century regimes. Given the fear of the downfall of patriarchal domestic hierarchical arrangements, as well as the perceived limitations of the vigilance system over the hired maids’ previous work and life conditions, domestic servants emerged as constant threats to the family’s moral integrity and physical safety. Higher standards of house management, domestic hygiene and childcare also set the groundwork for the elite’s sense of increased vulnerability and helped disseminate the equally popular stereotype of the incompetent and lazy maid. The works of proto-feminist Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1863-1934) are a case in point in demonstrating the then-nascent ‘servant problem’ narrative in the national public culture, as well as the related contradictions surrounding the literary imagination of domestic servants/service in modern Brazil. Almeida’s most well-regarded novels, such as A viúva Simões (The Widow Simões, 1897), Memórias de Marta (Martha’s Memoirs, 1889) as well as her Livro das noivas (The Brides’ Handbook, 1896),2 provide telling parameters of the popularity of the threatening literary maid. On one hand, maids in her writing functioned as utilitarian signs of contamination aimed at promoting the ‘cult of domesticity’ among female readers. By way of addressing maid characters as agents of moral and physical contamination (in particular, slumdweller wet nurses and laundresses), for instance, Almeida endeavored to persuade her women readers to assume higher domestic responsibilities, especially the duties of household supervision, breastfeeding and childrearing. Almeida’s strategic use of ‘contaminating’ maids became a key part in a wider intellectual/medical campaign to increase women’s attachment to the house, vis-à-vis the gender-related perils involved in the appeals of

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mundane life that also increased during Rio’s Belle Époque years (18981914). In a way, she managed to combine the issues of domesticity and women’s education rights (or simply put, “being educated in order to educate”) within the same battle for enhancing elite women’s social standing. Prominent Latin American women intellectuals compensated for the historic economic devaluation of the labor performed in households by attaching to it a superior moral value. According to a few scholars, such intellectual pleas for elevating society’s regard for women’s reproductive activities meant, for Almeida’s generation, a claim for the expansion of active female roles in the nation’s projects (Francine Masiello, Civilización, p.91). Needless to say, however, elite women’s duties as homemakers would never be regarded as the ultimate feminine ‘civic mission’ were they not set in stark contrast to the ‘degrading’ service performed by low status women. Indeed, elite mothers could see to the honorable task of being their children’s primary educators and civilizers only insofar as the dirty work of motherhood was transferred to hired nursemaids and nannies. By the same token, the new elite woman was assigned to supervise the home (meaning a sort of moral and spiritual refuge), provided that such a task freed her from performing the ‘dirty’ labor associated with the physical space of the house. Although the racial division of housework was meant to ensure the triumph of the cult of domesticity among elite women, such labor hierarchy had nonetheless depicted maids’ ‘otherness’, or better yet, their liminal status as ‘outsiders within’ their employers’ households. In this regard, in order to protect the equation between home and family’s sacred shelter, servants were to be considered as ‘part of the family’ and attached to it by bonds of love, loyalty and dependence. In other words, in favor of perpetuating the ‘home and hearth’ ideology that construed domestic space as a sanctuary “haloed with maternal imagery” (quoted in Frazer Ward, ‘Foreign and Familiar Bodies’ p.10), domestic servants’ ‘strangeness’ had to be attenuated by a still active rhetoric of surrogate daughterhood (and for similar purposes, narratives of surrogate motherhood and friendship). Here lies one of the main reasons that politically organized house workers had fought for decades to refashion domestic service as a regular profession. As recent historiography on Latin American house labor has argued, domestic service was actually promoted in the late 19th-century onward as a form of protection for low-income women, as well as a moral necessity for those “whose sex, class status, and age often rendered them inherently vulnerable to vice” (Nara Milanich, ‘Domestic Servant’ p.12). Under the “patriarchal tutelage of a father-master and a mistress-mother” (p.12), a maid was promised a symbolic gain in respect. According to Almeida’s writings as well as the work by other influential Latin American women writers like the Colombian Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913),3 maids thus played a double role in both sustaining and challenging the bourgeois premises of domesticity. Indeed, such writers praised servants’ family-like status while ‘othering’ them through narratives concerning their distinctive lifestyles, desires and habits (Ray and Qayum, p.8). Perhaps no

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3 See in particular de Samper’s domestic manual Consejos à las mujeres: Consejos à las señoritas seguidos de los consejos à las madres y cartas a una recién casada (1896), as well as her re-edited story ‘Una Pesadilla, Bogotá en el año de 2000’ (in Revista Iberoamericana).

For more information on the mammy stereotype in Brazilian modernism, see my previous articles: ‘A mãe-preta de Freyre e Lins do Rego’ (in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana) and ‘Precocious Boys: Race and Sexual Desire in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s Autobiographical Poems’ (in AfroHispanic Review); as well as my book chapter ‘“My Ol’ Black Mammy”: Childhood Maids in Brazilian Modernist Memoirs’ (in Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889-1999). 5 For more on the images and conditions of the wet nurse’s life at the end of the 19th century, see Sonia M. Giacomini. ‘Ser escrava no Brasil’ (Estudos Afro-Asiáticos [Cândido Mendes University], no.15, 1988, pp.145170); Elizabeth K. C. de Magalhães & Sônia M. Giacomini. ‘A escrava ama-de-leite: anjo ou demônio?’ ( in Carmen Barroso and Albertina Oliveira Costa (eds). Mulher, mulheres. São Paulo: Fundação Carlos Chagas, 1983, pp.7388); Rafaela de Andrade Deiab. ‘A memória afetiva da escravidão’ (Revista de História da Biblioteca Nacional, vol.1, no. 4, October 2005, pp.36-40); and, finally, Maria Elizabeth Ribeiro Carneiro. ‘Procuram-se amas-deleite na historiografia da escravidão: da “suavidade do leite preto” ao “fardo” dos homens brancos’ (Em Tempo de Histórias [University of Brasília] vol. 5, no. 5, 2001).

other maid figure embodied these conflicting notions so dramatically as the mãe preta (or black mammy) stereotype. The emphasis on the mammy’s maternal care and unconditional devotion, as well as on her Christian values and kindness, were central aspects of the construction of this stereotype in the 19th-century literature and iconography, which distinguished her from the highly sexualized African-descendent women of servile status. In addition, her loyalty to the members of her employing family also contributed to distancing her from rebellious or revengeful domestic slaves that frequently appeared in national abolitionist discourses. Previously considered a symbol of transracial affection in 19th-century photography, childhood memoirs and slavery fiction, the mammy character gradually moved from elite Brazilians’ narratives of love and nostalgia into post-slavery intellectual discourses against ‘mercenary’ (versus ‘natural’) breastfeeding. No longer rendered as the loving surrogate black mother, the post-slavery ‘demammified’ wet nurse actually entered the public arena of childcare discourses as an agent of contagion by means of breastfeeding and general conviviality with white children. It took at least one decade before the mammy stereotype returned to the national literary and artistic canon as a significant trope of nostalgia in the works of major avant-gardists (or modernistas), like José Lins do Rego, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jorge de Lima and Tarsila do Amaral. During the 1920s and 30s, the black mammy was incorporated into a variety of cultural expressions, folklore studies and the social sciences as an emblem of blacks’ self-sacrificial devotion and loyalty, as well as black culture’s impact on the national race/character. However, the tribute to the mammy found in several fictional and non-fictional discourses served less to remediate the maligning of domestic servants (both fictive and real-life maids) than it did to grant credibility and even authenticity to modernists’ transracial works.4 In other words, given the Africanist vogue within the modernism movement, several (white) artists relied on their ‘filial’ attachment to their childhood mammies so as to validate their ability to see “[their] black subjects, as it were, ‘from the inside’” (Jerome Branche, ‘Negrism’, p.172). Yet, while providing modernists with a rationale for their representations of blackness, the mammy stereotype did not contribute to the liberation of poor black women from their imagined innate predisposition toward servility (nor did the stereotype help disassociate womanhood from altruism).5 Additionally, because the mammy stereotype was primarily associated with the bygone plantation/slavery culture, her prolific figure did not defeat the circulation of images of self-centered, greedy and unreliable domestic servants. In a way, the stereotype contributed to the longevity of these images: the nostalgic evocation of loyal servants from the past implied that exemplary servitude was incompatible with modernity. As historian Emília Viotti da Costa suggests, the popularity of icons of cross-racial alliances such as the mammy stereotype was contingent on the period (the 1930s) “when blacks organized a Black Front [Frente Negra

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Brasileira] to fight for the improvement of their conditions” (Brazilian Empire, p.244). The loving mammy became an appealing figure of reconciliation meant to symbolically remediate enduring psychological damages and conflicts inherited from the slave era; additionally, her narrative worked to disavow subsequent ‘racial problems’ involving blacks’ struggles for selfinclusion in the country’s growing modernization. On the other hand, despite such existing symbolic maneuvers to counter the Afro-Brazilian organized struggles in those years, the aforementioned Brazilian Black Front became a key forum of political mobilization for blue-collar workers, including domestic servants.6 According to activist Francisco Lucrécio’s testimony, “many families categorically refused to accept black maids; they began to accept them when the Black Front was created. It got to the point of demanding that these black women were card-carrying members of the Front” (Frente Negra, p.38). Scholarship as well as other political testimonies about Brazilian maids’ activism have highlighted the pioneering leadership of Laudelina de Campos Melo (1904-1991), herself a proactive member of the Black Front and responsible for the foundation of Brazil’s first labor associations of domestic workers (São Paulo and Santos in 1936; Campinas in 1961). In the 1960s and 70s, a stronger and more diversified network of political allies (including progressive clergy members) would help reinvigorate the movement after a period of censorship under Getúlio Vargas’ regime (1930-1945). Thanks to this second wave of political activism, as previously mentioned, contracted housemaids gradually earned more legal support; several maids have also gained political capital, and an awareness of the interrelated socio-racial and gender factors that have acted upon the historic informality/legal fragility and social depreciation of their profession. As is well known, the so-called ‘new’ Brazilian subaltern social movements – many of them organized by poor black women (Sonia Alvarez, Engendering, p.43) – emerged within the contemporary context of identity politics, which has disavowed reconciling cultural icons such as the black mammy figure. In my view, the ambivalent treatment of maid characters in the works of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) offers an illuminating case of the demise of the mammy stereotype in Brazilian literature. Several of Lispector’s signed columns for Jornal do Brasil in the late 1960s, in which she narrates her own relations with former maids, conveyed the message that docility did not always reflect a low-status woman’s inclination toward servility; on the contrary, it might sometimes bespeak the ingenuous expression of the maid’s silent resentment. In her crônicas, Lispector also challenged other writers’ supposedly self-interested uses of maid characters by framing her own accounts of her former servants within an affective structure of personal guilt and embarrassment. Yet, perhaps to attenuate her shame, Lispector employed strategies to transcend the socially-inferior condition of her represented maids, reducing them to essentialized figures that seemed to belong more to her fictional world than to the real-life domestic arena of socio-racial difference and possible confrontation.

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6 On Brazilian maids’ political activism, consult: Lenira Carvalho’s A luta que me fez crescer (Interviewed by Cornélia Parisius. Recife: DAD, Bagaço, 1999); Maria Suely Kofes de Almeida’s Mulher, mulheres: identidade, diferença e desigualdade na relação entre patroas e empregadas domésticas (Campinas: Editora UNICAMP, 2001); and Joaze BernardinoCosta’s ‘Sindicato das trabalhadoras domésticas no Brasil: Um movimento de resistência e reexistência’ (Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios del Trabajo vol. 20, no. 2, 2008, pp.69-90). For more on the maids’ movement in other Latin American countries, read: Elizabeth Quay Hutchison’s ‘Shifting Solidarities: The Politics of Household Workers in Cold War Chile’ (in Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 91, no. 1, February 2011, pp.129-61), as well as Merike Blofield’s Carework and Class: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

Although my study of the cultural imaginary of domestic servants in Brazilian literature reveals a diverse spectrum of rhetorical and ideological roles performed by maid characters over time, it also demonstrates that writers have systematically employed the maid figure to ‘work for’ their own interests rather than for liberating servants from racialized stereotypes mainly concerning African-descendent women. The three historical and literary moments analyzed in this paper (namely, the Belle Époque period, the historical avant-garde and the politicized 1960s) reveal the instrumentality of literary maids for the sake of (a) assuring domestic governability in the aftermath of abolition; (b) granting credibility to transracial writings; and/or (c) promoting writers’ ethical values and social responsibility. Even the maids’ testimonial vogue in the 1980s and 90s should be analyzed vis-à-vis the politics of self-representation in those years rather than within the strict framework of authenticity and referentiality. In fact, without denying the value of maids’ enunciation rights, it is important to bear in mind female domestic servants’ own uses of autobiographical texts in order to gain respect and solidarity. As I have tried to demonstrate briefly in this essay, literary maids have played recurring, central roles in intellectual discourses featuring the elaboration and negotiation of social class, gender and race in Brazil.

References Almeida, Júlia Lopes de. Memórias de Marta. Paris: Livraria Francesa e Estrangeira Truchy-Leroy, n.d. (1st ed. 1889). —. Livro das noivas. 4th ed. Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo: Livraria Francisco Alves, Paulo de Azevedo e Cia., 1926 (1st ed. 1896). —. A viúva Simões. Florianópolis: Ed. Mulheres, 1999 (1st ed. 1897). Alvarez, Sonia E. ‘Women in the Social Movements of Brazil’. In Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Armstrong, Nancy. ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’. In Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds). The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. New York, London: Methuen, 1987, pp.96-141. Branche, Jerome. Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Costa, Emília Viotti da. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. rev. ed. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

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Graham, Sandra L. House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Lispector, Clarice. A paixão segundo G. H. Critical Edition. Benedito Nunes (ed.). 2nd ed. Madrid, Paris, México, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Lima: ALLCA XX, 1996 (Archivos Collection). —. Correio feminino. Comp. Aparecida Maria Nunes. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2006. —. Só para mulheres. Comp. Aparecida Maria Nunes. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2006. —. A descoberta do mundo. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984. Lucrécio, Francisco. ‘Depoimento.’ In Aristides Barbosa et al. (eds). Frente Negra Brasileira: depoimentos. São Paulo: Quilombhoje, 1998. Masiello, Francine. Entre civilización y barbarie: mujeres, nación, y cultura literaria en la Argentina moderna. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997. Milanich, Nara. ‘From Domestic Servant to Working-Class Housewife: Women, Labor, and Family in Chile’. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe, vol. 16, no. 1, January-June 2005, pp.1-28. Ray, Raka and Seemin Qayum. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Roncador, Sônia. Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil (1889-1999). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. —. ‘O demônio familiar: lavadeiras, amas-de-leite e criadas na narrativa de Júlia Lopes de Almeida’. Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp.94-119. —. ‘As criadas de Júlia’. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 12, 2007, pp.249- 262. —. ‘Precocious Boys: Race and Sexual Desire in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s Autobiographical Poems’. Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 27, no. 2, Fall 2008, pp.91-113. —. ‘A mãe-preta de Freyre e Lins do Rego’. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 33, no. 65, 2007, pp.117-38.

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Samper, Soledad Acosta de. Consejos à las mujeres: Consejos à las señoritas seguidos de los consejos à las madres y cartas a una recién casada. Paris: Garnier Hermanos, Libreros-Editores, 1896. —. ‘Una Pesadilla, Bogotá en el año de 2000’. Revista Iberoamericana, vol. 68, no. 194-195, January-June 2001, pp.295-303. Ward, Frazer. ‘Foreign and Familiar Bodies’. In Jesús Fuenmayor et al. (eds). Dirt & Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992.

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Bodies that arrive, that stay and that leave by Rossana Brandão Tavares Rossana Brandão Tavares is a feminist, architect and urbanist (EAU/UFF) with a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning (IPPUR/UFRJ). She is studying for a doctorate in Urbanism (PROURB/UFRJ) and did a sandwich PhD at AgroParisTech in France (CAPES/COFECUB). She is currently lecturing at UNIGRANRIO. She has worked with extension studies, research and popular education at FASE Rio de Janeiro. She was a student militant on the national board of education, research and extension studies, part of the National Federation of Students of Architecture. this article was produced as part of an open call organized in partnership with myrdle court press (www.myrdlecourtpress.net) and the federal university of pernambuco (www. ufpe.br). the article was also published in the online magazine aquitextos (vitruvius).

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Introduction

Early in the morning, as we walk the streets of Brazil’s major cities, it’s not hard to note the coming and going on the sidewalks of middle- and upperclass neighborhoods. This bustle involves two sets of bodies that differ not only in their clothing, demeanor, color, class and gender, but also, and mainly, in the direction they are moving: while some are leaving, others are arriving. Those on their way out, heading for workplaces or going about family business, are the employers of those who are arriving. The outbound leave mostly in cars, though some will also take public transport, meeting the inbound on their way. At this time of day, the residents of these neighborhoods experience a dual flow: one on the street and the other in their own homes. Those arriving in these areas and entering those homes are called ‘domestics’. However, while the day may be only beginning for those leaving the area, it’s already well into its second leg for the domestics. Back in their own neighborhoods, where they are not yet ‘domestics’ but still mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, friends, they are neighbors, the denizens of shantytowns, of outlying slums or even of satellite towns. Many of them wake and depart before dawn, bracing themselves for the bus ride to their destination: ‘the boss lady’s1 house’. This bustle of bosses and domestics in metropolises riven with sociospatial disparity is the focus of this article. First of all, we aim to reflect on how these influxes and outflows in such different parts of the city reflect contradictions between the way cities and domestic employment are produced in Brazil. To do so, we will start from the socio-urban contradictions of the city of Rio de Janeiro in order to evince the impact this has on the daily lives of the domestic workforce.

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1 Throughout this article we favor the term ‘boss lady’, as domestics tend to relate mainly with the lady of the house. We are, however, aware of a gender shift in this respect, especially in the light of new family configurations.

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Kergoat uses the metaphor of the spiral to explain such concepts, in opposition to the classical (circular) form of analyzing social relations.

How, we shall ask, do the spatial enclaves of the contemporary middleand upper-classes (Caldeira, 2000) and the segregated neighborhoods where the domestics live reveal the urban dynamics of their respective families? What urban characteristics and problematics interfere in the everyday lives of these household workers? Our aim is also to present analyses of the reasons why middle-class families are still unable to imagine a family dynamic that does not involve some form of domestic help. Furthermore, we will also try to ascertain the extent to which social practices and the way urban space is apportioned contribute to our analysis of this social reality. We might underscore here that, in the interests of a non-mechanical analysis of social relations in the urban theater, we have opted to broach social practices in the city by taking a coextensive look at public and private space, based on the reflections of the French sociologist Danièle Kergoat (2012), especially her concept of coextensivity2. This author pursues a more dynamic understanding of social practices in the face of a tripartite social division of labor (class, gender and origin – or, in terms of the Brazilian social reality: class, gender and race/color). Another researcher who poses a methodological challenge is Teresa Caldeira, especially in her critique of stock analyses of the legal/illegal and public/private. These dichotomies force distinctions that do not exist in social life, where they often occur simultaneously, in overlap. These dichotomies do not grasp the essentially dynamic and often paradoxical nature of social practices. (Caldeira, 2000, p.141-142) My interest in the theme is longstanding and derives from observations that date back to my university years, as a student of architecture and urbanism. It was during that period that I first noticed this matinal influx into my home neighborhood. I used to leave for Niterói at six each morning, and I began to wonder what sort of day lay ahead of all those women I passed along the way, and who, having awoken far earlier than I, were already arriving for work at that time. That was perhaps one of my first realizations of the connection between gender inequality and the city. It is for this reason that, methodologically speaking, the reflections developed in this article are not limited to my readings on the theme or the interviews I conducted, but also draw upon personal history, inspired by the North-American feminist critical theory known as Black Feminism. One of the main aspects of this line of critique is its recourse to personal histories, factoring oneself in – even in the capacity of researcher – as an active subject in the processes of social contradiction (hooks, 1990; Dorlin, 2008). In other words, I defend the idea that we need to break with the notion of ‘scientific neutrality’, as all academic work is based upon ideologies, principles and objectives that are far from disengaged or neutral.

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Urban trajectories

To speak about your own movements is an exercise in self-analysis and reflection upon life. That was the impression I got from the interviews with domestic employees, working women from different parts of Greater Rio. Their descriptions of daily commutes to and from work reveal the naturalization of their condition of ‘vulnerability’ in the urban space, evincing the strategies of escape and protection that make their working lives possible. I put vulnerability in speech marks because these are, in fact, resilient women who challenge the still predominant notion that they are fragile and passive. From their movements in the street it is clear how readily recognizable they are as domestics, both to themselves and to others who see them. Sometimes, when I wake up – I live on the main street, see – like, at 5:30 in the morning, I look out my window and there are so many women walking by, so early, and I think to myself: women are braver than men. (Teresa, domestic and cook, 51 years of age)3 The majority presence of women in the urban space in the outlying areas of the city and in Greater Rio, especially during the morning, reveals two important factors already diagnosed by the Census. There has been a

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3 Names have been changed to protect the identities of the women interviewed, as many of these live in dangerous areas and asked to have their real names withheld.

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4 Recife, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Porto Alegre (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 2013).

gradual historical increase in the percentage of women in employment in metropolitan Rio (from 37.9% in 2003 to 39.4% in 2012) and a similar rise in the percentage of female household heads. However, it is important to note that there is a great deal of precarious, under-the-radar labor going on. The Census figures do not include unregistered workers, accounting for an estimated 64.8% of the real metropolitan workforce in 2003 and 60.7% in 2012.4 A considerable swath of the population is driven into informal work due to a lack of qualifications and schooling, forcing them to forego benefits and job stability. If we look at the 2010 statistics for subnormal agglomerations (shantytowns, for example) in areas of Greater Rio de Janeiro we see that women account for 40% of household heads, with the percentage rising above 50% in certain cases. Though the black woman who ‘leaves early to go to work’ is something of a stereotype in these areas, it is not an altogether unfounded one. According to the 2006 Brazilian Census document The Profile of Domestic Workers in Six Metropolitan Regions Covered by the Monthly Employment Survey, 93.7% of those in domestic employment in Greater Rio are women, and 68.8% are self-declared black/pardo. If we look at figures for transport, the evidence is even more explicit. Most surveys show that women account for the majority of passengers embarking on public transport between 5 and 6 o’clock in the morning in metropolitan Rio and between 6 and 7 o’clock in suburban Rio, and most of these are probably domestics. For those living in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro (Tijuca, Copacabana, Catete, Flamengo, Barra, Jacarepaguá, where the interviewees work), there is no missing the early-morning influx of women into these overwhelmingly residential boroughs. Cleuza (a 47-year-old day maid) attests to the movement: - So there are visibly more women in the streets when you leave home? - Oh yes. When I leave home, at 4:30am, you could count the men on one hand… the rest are all women. - How many women would we be talking about, roughly? - The “pirate” (clandestine bus that runs in her neighborhood) holds 50. You’ve maybe five or six men… so that’s 40-odd women. And if you go out into the streets at this time, you’ll see the place full of young lads, say 18 to 20 years old, just hanging out… Another factor that indicates a significant presence of domestics circulating in the city during the morning and late in the afternoon or at night is the conversation at the bus stop or on board. - How can you tell someone is a fellow worker? - Yes. By the way they speak. All excited... because some bosses are worth working for. - I mean a domestic, a day maid...

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By the way they complain; complain the whole time. It’s one thing in front of the boss, but behind their backs, at the bus stop, on the bus… that’s all you hear. Which boss lady pays less, which boss is this, that or the other. That’s all you hear. Nobody has a good word to say about the boss. I ride the bus with the window down so I don’t have to listen to it. (Maria, day worker, 55) We cannot ignore the fact that what identifies these women as domestics is not their clothes, handbags or demeanor, but principally their gender, color and origin. The domestics I interviewed or who have crossed my path have mostly been black migrants from the northeast of the country. I remember as a kid being taken aback the first time I saw a white domestic, and how uncomfortable it made me feel, as up until then it had just been normal for me that domestics in the ‘big cities’ of the southeast should be black women from the northeastern states. I admit this made me feel vulnerable; it gave me an almost selfish sensation… but it was also the first time I noticed that there was something out of place. The day maids I interviewed had all previously worked as full-time domestics. This shift from monthly to daily rates has emerged as a trend since the promulgation of Constitutional Amendment 66, of 2012, the so-called Domestics CA, which extended labor rights to this class of worker. According to many domestics, the move arose as a choice, a chance for more autonomy and control over one’s work. However, this amendment came as a shock for the middle class, which could no longer count on a status quo traditionally stacked in its favor. If each epoch is unique in its history, something similar is happening in Brazil in the 21st century, after the expansion of rights for the domestic worker. Our roots in a patriarchal slave society based around the manor and the slave shack taught us to mold urban progress to suit our needs. Conservative modernity

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extended a lifeline of servility to the urban family. The dominant classes always demanded that the benefits of urbanism retain those of servant labor, with a retinue of cooks, maids, chauffeurs, nannies, governesses and, more recently, personal trainers to keep them in shape, and valet parking for their cars at restaurants, etc. As industrial wage-paying jobs drove the Negro from the factory floor (to make way for the white immigrant), we were left with a glut of former slave labor that was redirected into domestic employment, and this, as a prolongation of plantation slavery, has maintained all the benefits of servitude. Now, those “on top”, as Florestan Fernandes put it, are shaken by the expansion of rights for those “on the bottom”. Something disturbs them in this plebian progress. (Antunes, 2013)

5 According to the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (2010), most women in employment are over 40.

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With this, the day maid, hitherto the exception, never the rule, has become the main means by which the middle class can ensure the continued presence of household help. In most of the day-maid cases researched, the old practices continue, with working hours and employer-employee relations arranged to suit the hiring family. In order to understand how the workers themselves see the boss family’s dependence upon their labor, we asked them about the differences in dynamic between their own homes and those of their employers. They all mentioned organization as the key. In their homes, they were the ones responsible for the housework, with some help from neighbors, family (mothers, sisters, aunts) and, in some cases, their own children. In middleand upper-class families house management is still seen as the woman’s responsibility (there is no dynamic of collaboration in this regard), and she, the woman of the house, delegates much of this to the domestic, who is ultimately the person encumbered with organizing the residential space. Listening to the interviewees, there is a prevailing sense that the domestics feel that more is expected of their work than they can actually provide. The boss will often expect them not only to clean, but in fact organize the household for a whole week in a single shift. The live-in maids, on the other hand, related little difference in this respect, as their own domestic lives are largely blurred into those of their employers. Many of these agree to such working conditions because of the distance from their own residences (sometimes in neighboring towns), which means they have to leave their domestic management in the care of others (usually members of the family). The effective result of this arrangement is that they become remote breadwinners and visitors in their own homes. Some day maids see advantages to live-in work, given their sapping experience with low-quality public transport, on which they are exposed to all manner of danger. This is not a recent phenomenon and requires tried-andtested but constantly ‘fine-tuned’ protection strategies. Most of the women interviewed were over 405, but they still found it safer to go out in groups or with a chaperone, to use alternative forms of transport and to ride buses and trains armed with a sewing needle to ward off unwanted attention.

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When I lived in Niterói I would only leave the house with my husband beside me, especially when I was pregnant. Nobody shows any respect on the bus. It was a real struggle when it reached the Bridge (Rio-Niterói)... there’d be muggings and all sorts of messing. Now I don’t have to go through that anymore, thank God! (Fátima, domestic, 39, lives in Copacabana. Her husband works as a doorman at a building near the one she works in.) - Things are more practical today, because I leave home at 4:30am, and there’s this guy who works in Copacabana and he gives us a ride in for 8 reais, see? [...] Before, I used to get the bus, or the train. That was a real sacrifice. - How long does it take you to get to Rio? - Well... these days I get in early, earlier than usual. I leave at 4:30 and I’m there by 6:15. It takes three hours by bus, or by train. And the same back again. - What was the train like? - Packed [...] And it’s no use to me now. - Have you ever felt harassed on the train? - There were times I had to prick people with a needle (laughs), if you follow. So to avoid the worst I found an alternative form of transport. - Do you feel safe in the street? - No. You can’t feel safe anymore, because there are three drug points up there. So the gangs... after they started installing those police protection units downhill6, the gangs all moved further up. So it’s more dangerous now. (Cleuza, 47, lives in Nova Iguaçu)

6 Expression residents of the Baixada Fluminense typically use to refer to the city of Rio de Janeiro.

At my family home, I remember there was a domestic who often had to skip work because of gang-related violence in the shantytown where she lived, and this became a problem jobwise. It wasn’t just the absenteeism, though. The fact that she was out of the home was another worry, as she had three teenage daughters and her house was a constant target for gang harassment. Fear was a staple of her life, whether in public space or in her own home. She used to say that if she worked in an office or factory she would have been fired long ago. To make matters worse, the neighborhoods these domestics live in tend to have inadequate infrastructure. Some still depend on wells for water, have no street lighting and are located near strips of waste land that are used as clandestine rubbish tips by irregular disposal companies. Furthermore, many of these areas are subject to flooding and other environmental risks, such as landslides. In almost every case, these women, though many of them are married, bear the brunt of household responsibility, not only economically, but also when it comes to dealing with the inevitable problems thrown up by their precarious living conditions, such as kids taking ill through water-borne infection, difficulty in finding suitable places for garbage disposal and the search for material alternatives when the household is left vulnerable. They are also the main source of psychological and emotional support to the children and other family members.

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The interviewees living in suburban Rio enjoy better conditions than those in the Baixada Fluminense, especially in terms of their immediate surroundings. There are usually better services and leisure options available, even if many of these women prefer to spend their free time at home. - I can’t complain about where I live. It’s not a dangerous place and it has everything you might need. I live practically in the center of town, near SESC Madureira. [...] I go to the Central Market, to the local shops. I generally stay around Madureira, though I’d give my right arm not to have to go out at all. - Is there a park or square near your house? - There is, but I rarely go. Only once in a while. [...] My family all live in Campo Grande, so when I can I go there for the weekend, to Campo Grande, see? (Teresa, 51) There are also those who won’t go without a good night out, at the weekend funk ball or samba ring. “I’d go nuts without it, mad as a brush” (Roberta, from Engenho da Rainha). However, this tends to meet with reprobation from bosses and peers, especially for those over 35. The main response, according to sources, is that “a working mother has to show some self-respect…” Control over the body is relentless, whether at work, on the streets, aboard public transport, at the local bar or in the home. These women are constantly being observed, analyzed and judged, but they refuse to succumb to the imposed role of the passive, submissive homemaker. If we look back at the cooks, cleaners and washerwomen of late 19th-, early 20th-century Rio slums and compare their lot with that of the domestics of today, we see that the main concerns have always been with economic independence (Soihet, 1989; Napomuceno, 2012) and the welfare of the family. Analyzing the social resistance strategies of domestic workers is one way to deconstruct the gender stereotypes our society insists on imposing upon our bodies. The history and everyday life of our cities are an important key to

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denaturalizing the discourses and practices that reinforce the inequalities between men and women, especially those who are poor and black. Distancings and approximations

Members of middle- and upper-class families, unlike the domestics, live their lives at the city’s urban heart. Most of them don’t know the neighborhoods and towns their domestics come from. However hard these may try to describe their world, they rarely, if ever, manage to convey the magnitude of the urban challenges they confront. Many members of domestic-employing families relate that the only real contact they have with the outlying suburbs and towns is through the women who work in their homes. On the other hand, for some of these women, working as a domestic is a chance to experience the other side of the urban coin, where all the facilities are (especially on Rio’s south-side). It enables them to take a stroll down the Copacabana promenade and “feel the sea breeze” away from the watchful eyes of neighbors and family. It can often mean financial and psychological independence from a jealous or chauvinistic husband, or simply provide a window of opportunity through which to demystify urban dreams and ideals. Teresa offered a particularly lucid account of her experience of different corners of the city. An example is her comparison between the Barra and Tijuca neighborhoods. - So... Barra is more, see? A more... I used to want to live in Barra myself. It was my dream… But after I went to work there, God forgive me… there’s so much traffic… you know? The people there aren’t like the folks here... the people in Barra are more isolated. You hardly see anyone in the street. At the bus stop, there’s no-one to chat with… like you have here in Tijuca. Here there are shops, malls, and stuff. - Where do you feel safer, here or in Barra? - Here. Because you don’t see many people there. You see few people and more cars. Each to his own little world. Here people walk around and you can chat. - Do see any similarity with Madureira? - Yeah, it’s more similar here… it’s like Madureira. There’s more bustle. You’ve party buffets, 18 or so bars, a football pitch. So there’s less lacking here. And there’s transport to wherever you need. [...] I’d live here if I could! Middle- and upper-class enclaves (in the accounts of both hiring families and hired domestics) present two aspects that coax reflections on the processes of segregation at work in contemporary Brazilian metropolises, especially concerning our understanding of the word ‘city’. Teresa, the maid, and Teresa Caldeira (2000), the anthropologist, provide clues as to how social practices reveal our indifference to the impact of socio-spatial segregation. We might conclude that it is not only buildings and condos that serve as enclaves, to use Caldeira’s term, but whole neighborhoods. In her book Cidade de Muros: Crime, Segregação e Cidadania em São Paulo (City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo), the

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7 See chapter titled: ‘homeplace: a site of resistance’, in hooks, bell. Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics.

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author uses the term enclave to designate all privately-owned properties reserved for collective use by a given group. “They devalue what is public and open in the city. Ensconced behind walls, fences, buffers and other architectonic features, they are inward-looking domains that ignore the street outside” (Caldeira, 2000, p.258), which is kept at arm’s length by rigorous security systems that impose strict rules of inclusion and exclusion, betraying a deep-set disdain for the public life of the city. Recoiling in the face of crime, they erect urban borders by privatizing spaces or restricting access to them. Indifference to difference and to the diversity of urban dynamics pervades both the discourse and the way many middle- and upper-class families filter their urban experience in the high-end neighborhoods of southside Rio, or Barra, Recreio and Jacarepaguá in the west-side, and Tijuco in the north. It’s a social indifference to the very employees who take care of their houses and with whom they form bonds of affection. The tendency to homogenize the urban space in a way that avoids interaction and the unexpected (Jacobs, 2000) and the restrictions placed upon the appropriation of urban space in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods through the elitization of consumption and the security schemes of stores and malls reinforce the segregation and stigmatization of bodies marked out by difference. In this sense, they can be considered enclaves on a whole other scale. The places where these women live bear little resemblance to what we understand by the city, i.e., by the formal city, with its facilities and amenities. Their neighborhoods are rife with all sorts of harassment, muggings and robberies, risks of all types, with precarious transport, discrimination and social inequalities. Over the course of my interviews, these domestics furnished me with information on social practices that unveiled their processes of resistance. These processes, as I see them, form generic spaces of resistance to inequality, ones that coextensively blend gender, color/race and class. Of course, there are limits to resistance, as I do not believe it is spaces that protect these domestics, as bell hooks (1990)7 said of Afro-American women and their homes in racially segregated cities, however important the home may be as a place of regeneration and renewal for their bodies and souls. In our case, the places where these domestics live afford none of the security or protection of which hooks spoke. So these spaces of generic resistance are not fixed places, but rather operate out of their own bodies through the social practices they pursue. As such, these generic practices of resistance are sparked by spaces and the processes of inequality, discrimination, exploitation, oppression and socio-spatial segregation by which they are territorialized. The process of theoretical and empirical investigation of gender in urban studies, with emphasis on urbanism, has revealed not only symptoms of social conflict, but also the urgent need to treat their underlying causes. I sought to study the social practices of domestics through their discourse and

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my own empirical observation, as one of the methodological means toward analyzing the contradictions in the way our cities are produced. As I see it, blind spots remain in the study of urban space in Brazilian cities which the materialist approach of a feminist critical theory could perhaps redress. The description and analysis of the gendered spaces of resistance that surround these women’s bodies could be one possible contribution to the debate on gender inequality in Brazilian urban studies. Lending visibility to these social practices is a way of strengthening both the importance of feminist critical theory to urbanism and the political resources available to these women in their fight for their rights – not only in the field of labor, but in every other sphere of their lives as city-dwellers. References Abreu, Maurício. Evolução Urbana do Rio de Janeiro. 4th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Pereira Passos, 2008. Antunes, Ricardo. A Revolta na Sala de Jantar. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial/ Notícias. Available at <http://www.boitempoeditorial.com.br/v3/news/ view/2367>. Accessed on 01/07/2014 Ahmed, Sara. Differences That Matters: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Beauvoir, Simone de. O Segundo Sexo. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Difusão Europeia do Livro, 1970. Brites, Jurema. Afeto e Desigualdade: Gênero, Geração e Classe entre Empregadas Domésticas e Seus Empregadores. Cadernos Pagu, JulyDecember, 2007, pp.91-109.

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Caldeira, Teresa P. do Rio. Cidade de Muros: Crime, Segregação e Cidadania em São Paulo. São Paulo: Editora 34/Edusp, 2000. Choay, Francoyse. O Urbanismo, Utopias e Realidade, uma Antologia. Translated by Dafene Nascimento. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1965. Coutras, Jacqueline. Crise Urbaine et Espace Sexués. Paris: Ed Armand Colin, 1996. DeSena, Judith N. (ed.). Gender in an Urban World. Research in Urban Sociology vol. 9. Bingley: Emerald, 2008. Dorlin, Elsa. Black Feminism. Anthologie du Féminisme Africain-Americain, 1975-2000. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Da Redistribuição ao Reconhecimento? Dilemas da Justiça numa Era “Pós-Socialista”.’ Revista dos Alunos de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social Da USP, no. 15, 2006, pp.231-239. —. Le Feminism en Mouvements – Des Annés 1960 a l’Ère Néolibérale. Paris: La Découverte, 2013. Freyre, Gilberto. Sobrados e Mucambos: Decadência do Patriarcado Rural e Desenvolvimento do Urbano. Vol. 1. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1977. Gouveia, T. ‘Mulheres: Sujeitos Ocultos das/nas Cidades?’ Recife, 2004. Available at: <http://www.forumreformaurbana.org.br/biblioteca/ artigos-de-interesse/51-genero-e-feminismo/128-mulheres-sujeitosocultos-das-nas-cidades>. Accessed on 04/10/2015. Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields And Urban Growth 18202000. New York: Vintage Book, 2003. —. ‘What Would a Nonsexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work’. In Fainstein, Susan; Servon Lisa (ed.). Gender and Planning. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 43-66. hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. London: Pluto Press, 2000. —. Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Pesquisa Mensal do Emprego: Perfil dos Trabalhadores Domésticos nas Seis Regiões

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Metropolitanas Investigadas pela Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2006. —. Pesquisa Mensal do Emprego: Algumas das principais características dos Trabalhadores Domésticos vis a vis a População Ocupada. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2009. —. Pesquisa Mensal do Emprego: Retrospectiva 2003-2012 – 10 anos. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2013. —. Censo 2010. Available at <http://www.censo2010.ibge.gov.br/>. —. Pesquisa Mensal do Emprego: Região Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro – outubro de 2013. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2013. Jacobs, Jane. Morte e Vida de Grandes Cidades. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2000. Jacquet, Christine. ‘Urbanização e Emprego Doméstico’. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais (RBCS), vol. 18, no. 52, June 2003, pp.163-219. Kergoat, Danièle. Se Battre, Disent-Elles. Paris: La Dispute, 2012. Napomuceno, Bebel. ‘Mulheres Negras – Protagonismo Ignorado’. In Pinsky, Carla; Pedro, Joana (org.). Nova História das Mulheres. São Paulo: Ed. Contexto, 2012, pp.382-409. Saffioti, Heleieth. A Mulher na Sociedade de Classes: Mito e Realidade. São Paulo: Ed. Expressão Pouplar, 2013. Silvia. R. C. (org.). A Cidade pelo Avesso: Desafios do Urbanismo Contemporâneo. PROURB. Rio de Janeiro: Viana & Mosley Editora, 2006. Soihet, Rachel. Condição Feminina e Forma de Violência: Mulheres Pobres e Ordem Urbana, 1890-1920. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 1989. Valladares, Licia. A Invenção da Favela: do Mito de Origem a Favela. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2005. Villaça, Flavio. ‘A Segregação Urbana e a Justiça (ou a justiça no injusto espaço urbano)’. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Criminais, São Paulo, 2003. Available at <http://www.flaviovillaca.arq.br>. Accessed on 11/01/2010.

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The maid’s room:

A tale of unchanging apartheid in a changing domestic space by Edja Trigueiro and Viviane Cunha Edja Trigueiro lectures on undergraduate and post-graduate courses in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. She studied at the Federal University of Pernambuco (degree in Architecture, specialization in Sociology, and master’s degree in History) and at the Bartlett School, UCL, University of London (PhD in Advanced Studies in Architecture and a Post-doc internship as an Honorary Research Fellow). She supervises theses and dissertations that deal with the relationships between constructed form and sociocultural practices and coordinates the research group MUsA - Morphology and Uses of Architecture. Viviane Cunha is an architect who holds a doctorate from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is a guest researcher at University College of London, England, where she took her master’s degree. She provides consultancy on sustainable built environments and is a lecturer and LatinAmerican pioneer in sustainable building certification (BREEAM seal). She has 28 years of experience and is director of VCA Sustentabilidade and Viviane Cunha Associados. this article was produced as part of an open call organized in partnership with myrdle court press (www.myrdlecourtpress.net) and the federal university of pernambuco (www. ufpe.br). the article was also published in the online magazine aquitextos (vitruvius).

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Maria was a really great maid. You couldn’t even tell she was in.

Almeida (1987) About the most resilient domestic space and how to keep it so

“Today we are closing down the last slave quarters and throwing away the key” was the sentence said to have come from the President of the Brazilian Senate (Margolis, 2013, p.17) with reference to the act of legislature passed in April 2013, designed to grant new or ampler rights for domestic employees. The amendment to the constitution caused havoc up and down the country that is reputed to have the largest number of domestics in the world, being hailed by some as a “second emancipation from slave bondage”, by others as a hasty political manoeuvre on the eve of an election year, and by most (employers and employees alike) as yet another burden, demanding paperwork and the interpretation of inflexible though imprecise legal directions. Centuries-long household habits were suddenly outlawed, such as the round-the-clock interaction of family members and live-in maids (sometimes the only plausible arrangement for girls coming from hinterland areas). Is nanny to retreat into her room so that Junior can’t entice her into some play outside her working hours? Unconciliatory as the situation may seem, it will most certainly settle down into some more or less formalized arrangement as befits Brazilian ways and servants will carry on being part of the nation’s home scene for a long time to come. However, the recent legal turn has helped to bring the role of domestic workers into discussion among other issues, by exposing “the complex relationship that exists between housemaids and their employers, a relationship that confuses intimacy and power in the workplace”, as stated in the synopsis of the film Doméstica (Housemaids) that motivated this article. It may also lead a step further toward the disappearance of the most resilient of all household spaces: the maid’s

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bedroom, a descendent of the female slave quarters of colonial times,in form and content, syntax and semantics. This essay focuses on domestic space configuration in Brazil as evidence of changing modes of social behaviour. The panorama we outline covers a period of around 150 years, starting in the mid-19th century when the form of a built environment deeply marked by the Portuguese presence became gradually more exposed to foreign ways and steadily altered. It expresses sociocultural relations within households belonging to the middling layers of the social pyramid in the northeast and southeast regions of Brazil. The discussion stems from case studies of houses and flats examined by us and by other researchers engaged in finding the nexus in the relationship between architectural form and society in Brazil, mostly by applying an analytical approach based on the representation and quantification of the way in which key functions integrate the spatial structure, according to modelling procedures pertaining to the methodology of Space Syntax Analysis (Hillier and Hanson, 1984). The resilience or transience with which the spaces that accommodate such key functions hold their position in a discrete hierarchical order of accessibility across time, tells a lot about the modes of interaction among people closely related to those functions within that domestic milieu (Hanson, 1998). Morphological findings are also discussed in the light of the ‘classic’ literature about Brazilian domestic space. On a broad perspective, this diachronic spatial analysis of homes up and down the country shows that whereas nearly all key cells have been reshuffled in their relative position within the domestic spatial structure – both in geometric and topological terms – becoming more or less accessible in time, those occupied by servants span centuries of nearly unaltered spatial segregation. Detailing the analytical procedures applied in the studies that anchor this discussion escapes our aim and writing space. However, a few topological notions need be forwarded so that our argument makes sense. Three basic configuration schemes underpin the spatial layout of most buildings. To illustrate the notion, figure 1 shows a scheme of what could be a small building layout with three cells (nodes represent the cells and lines represent connections linking them). When a set of rooms connects to one or to a sequence of common spaces, i.e. separated bedrooms off a common hall (Hillier and Hanson, 1984, pp.159), a ‘bush’ arrangement is defined in topological terms. A bush (figure 1a) may segregate a sector from other sectors but allowing for a fairly close connection among the constituent parts of that sector. A ‘linear’ sequence of cells (figure 1b) exerts a much more effective mode of segregation since each cell controls access to the next, making it easier to cut connections at any point by the closing of a door. Last but not least, a circular or ‘ringy’ scheme (figure 1c) offers the possibility of alternative routes of access to the space that takes part in the ring, being, therefore, a powerful integrator.

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Figure 1 – Graph scheme of three possible layouts – bush-like, linear and ringy – in a hypothetic small building plan with three rooms (nodes represent the spaces and lines represent connections linking them).

Figure 1

The master bedroom and the maid’s bedroom are particularly noticeable for having changed the most and the least, respectively. Master bedrooms have shifted from a very privileged position, being situated mostly in rings or in bushes connected to rings, to a topologically segregated one (often in a linear sequence), similar to that of the servants’ quarters. However, the equivalences in spatial properties of seclusion do not disguise the enormous differences that set those spaces apart in virtually all aspects – size, light, ventilation, view, furnishing – and even the arrangement underpinning the syntactic nature of that seclusion (as shall be exposed), not to mention its corresponding semantic message. The artifice that insulates the housemaids’ rooms in recent times re-enacts former stratagems for achieving similar modes of exclusion (as in pre-modern homes) by means of a totally diverse spatial layout, which responds to sociocultural requirements that were not needed or even envisaged in the past. Although corroborating the pervasive refrain about the immutable segregation of servants in the literature, we aspire to expose nuances loaded in ambiguity and mouldability that reverberate the contradictions of our own sociocultural nature. From the repertoire: a diachronic overview

The overview to follow reinforces the idea that dwellings are artefacts spatially articulated to express discrete ways of life, but above all, to allow for the patterns of encounter and avoidance that define those ways. Dwellings are, therefore, emblematic representations of sociocultural transformations, and of how the search for social class distinction is reproduced in the microcosm of domestic life by means of a continuous restructuring of key functions over time. The spatial structure of Brazilian homes inhabited by middling social groups (those who employ most of the

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domestic labour in the country) has initially developed from a fairly flexible system towards a rigid one in which the rooms mainly used by members of each community – master, family, male/female slaves, visitors – hold one and the same discrete position in the hierarchy of accessibility; then to a system that maximises family interaction while flexing that among family, servants and visitors; then to a separation ingrained in the design of functional sectors; and finally, to a configuration that tends to insulate each community but may leave chance for knitting encounter opportunities between inhabitants and visitors. Throughout this trajectory that signals successive waves of convergence and retreat in the domestic milieu, also telling about changing modes of public/private interaction, there has always been a spatial manoeuvre that succeeds in keeping servants’ quarters at bay. a) Safekeeping goods and women Most of what remained – or records left – of the so-called ‘colonial house’ in Brazil date from the 19th century, either preceding or succeeding 1822, after which the country was in reality no longer a colony but continued to have a built environment strongly marked by Portuguese inheritance. In such colonial houses, the antagonism between the public and the private domains, the clear demarcation between areas used by masters and by slaves, and the polarity between male and female spaces are themes well explored in the literature. Freyre notes an aversion toward the street, resulting from a patriarchal system, which becomes exacerbated when transferred from the rural homesteads to the urban settlements. The fiercest struggle is said to have unfolded around women whom the patriarch sought to confine to the deep interiors of the home (Freyre, 1981, p.154). Vauthier (1981, pp.3941) informs that whereas “the owner of the house receives us with all pomp and ceremony” in the front room – an essentially masculine space – women are nowhere to be seen, securely kept behind closed doors that sever access to the interior of the house, a “gynaeceum protected from profane eyes”. Although studies point out a fairly broad diversity in house plans – especially in the earlier centuries of the colony – a certain layout is generally accepted as archetypical of colonial domestic architecture from at least the late 17th century (Smith, 1981, pp.121-123). (1) the large front room that connects directly to the balcony [located on the upper part] of the façade; (2) the central corridor; (3) the sequence of bedrooms or alcoves; (4) the large living room at the back; (5) the kitchen at the rear of the back room, to one side (Smith, 1981, p.123) However, space analysis of colonial house plans (Trigueiro, 1994) revealed the existence of two very distinct topological structures, both retaining all the elements, geometric display and layout that have granted the status of colonial archetype in the literature (figure 2). In nearly all studied

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cases, the front room (or visitors’ room) and the master bedroom – both male-related spaces – are closer to the main entrance and benefit from alternative accesses, being part of a ringy scheme together with the front room, the corridor and sometimes also a hall, landing or back passage, whereas all service-related spaces, including the kitchen, tend to be part of a linear sequence only accessible by means of various other spaces. However, the addition of alternative entrances may play a decisive role in altering the effect of such a layout in the accessibility of some key function. The exterior, therefore, serves in some cases as a bypass to re-structure an otherwise rigidly male-orientated hierarchy. Smith (1981, p.121) noted the integrating character of the rear staircase located in the backyard of an old sobrado1 in Olinda, possibly built in the 17th century, which epitomises this fairly flexible system of spatial interaction. By offering alternative connections between the worlds of the family and the outside, different readings of the spatial structure and different routes of access could be experienced by the diverse communities of inhabitants, notably women, whose gynaecium (the back room) becomes less segregated. The flexible spatial type found in older homes and in 19th-century semi-urban locations relates to the less rigid modes of social interaction reported by observers of the time, especially foreign visitors, who often expressed surprise concerning the informality of manners they witnessed during their stays in summer resorts sometimes in the company of the same people they knew to behave with extreme reserve in town. Conversely, an inflexible hierarchy of accessibility that places male-related spaces on the privileged end of the scale and female-related spaces on the other end – regardless of how many entrances are available to the house – was also found in 19th-century sobrados of Recife’s town centre. As the 19th century witnessed the apogee and decline of the patriarchal model, that unvarying male-centred sobrado seems to have been the last materialization of that era, thus confirming Freyre’s argument that the urban sobrado took up and retained, for as long as it was possible, the role of safekeeping women and valuables that had belonged to the casa-grande2. In both the flexible and the rigid configuration types of colonial dwellings, however, the slaves’ quarters were almost always spaces displayed in a linear sequence. If in a ring, this ring linked only to the exterior/street or defined a circuit detached from the other spaces. The street and the slaves’ quarters were, therefore, the most segregated spaces in the system, no matter the entrance chosen to access the building. b) Almost an urban senzala3 Despite their diverse built shells the late 19th-/early 20th-century, multi-volume, highly ornamented, eclectic houses (in which stylistic fads ranging from French neoclassic to Brazilian neocolonial through Alpine chalets and Victorian villas may be combined) present a recurrent layout. Two sequences of intercommunicating cells develop along a central axis, one

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1 Multi-storied colonial house.

Rural homestead.

3 The slaves’ quarters located in an independent outbuilding usually in a rural settlement.

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Figure 2 – Plans and graph schemes of two colonial residences (sobrados) that illustrate the coexistence of diverse spatial structures: one that allows for flexibility of access (left), and one that does not (right).

Figure 2

comprising mainly day rooms – the terrace or porch, sitting room, dining room, servery/daily meals (copa), kitchen and utility lobby – the other assembling bedrooms and the one bathroom used by the family. Servants were accommodated in outbuildings, well tucked away in the backyards, sometimes also comprising a laundry compound or a garage. In these houses, dining rooms tend to be the most privileged space as concerns geometric (larger and more centrally located) as well as topological properties (more accessible for being part of a ringy scheme connecting various doorways). Master bedrooms and to a lesser extent sitting (visitors’) rooms are also privileged in similar manner although tending to occupy a more reduced area (figure 3). The pervasiveness with which the master bedroom and the visitors’ room retain their integrating and controlling properties concerning all other spaces are evidence of continuity as refers colonial dwellings. On the other hand, the role played by dining rooms – in which the display of polished wood and leather, silverware and crystal, linen and lace is usually dealt with by the mistress of the house – tells about changing modes of behaviour concerning gender and display of social prestige in the domestic sphere. These houses are highly permeable and visible to the public domain by means of their exterior space which also functions as an important integrator of the interior spatial structure. Indoor and outdoor routes play a crucial role as they contribute to level hierarchy among day rooms and reduce the insulation of the outbuildings, while, at the same time, conferring high

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flexibility to the system that can become rigidly hierarchized, provided some doors are shut and alternative routes are broken up. The modelling of the configuration may define either a polarity that opposes a family-plus-visitors sphere to that of the servants or a three-partite structure of well-defined sectors for each of these communities. Outdoor areas, shaped into gardens, patios, yards and a multiplicity of terraces, are thus crucial for achieving a versatility of articulation not recorded before or afterwards as a mainstream trend in Brazilian domestic space. c) One roof, many walls In Brazil the ubiquitous acceptance of the modernist formal repertoire confers a general look of modernity more or less faithful to the International Style in terms of volume composition, stripped surfaces, horizontal windows and building materials. However, the recurrence of spatial articulations identified in pre-modernist homes suggests that space is organised to reproduce old types of interface among dwellers that feels like a reverse of what had been prescribed in the early discourse of the pioneers of the Modern Movement.

Figure 3 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Plans and graph schemes of a house built in the 1920s with outbuilding accommodation for servants.

Figure 3

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In floor plan, modernist houses can be identified mainly by being subdivided into sectors – social, service and private – as described by Cunha (1992) and Amorim (1999). These are orientated primarily to meet environmental requirements with the ‘noble’ sectors – social and private – located in the privileged sites. The private sector of bedrooms no longer intercommunicate, being mostly designed as dead-end cells off a hallway or after a sequence of transition spaces (i.e. staircase, landing, corridor, landing) that links the private to the social sectors, or, less frequently, also to the service sector. The servants’ quarters, albeit usually built under the same roof, do not link to any other part of the building except through the kitchen. Judging from various space syntax analysis of house plans (Marques and Trigueiro, 2000; Cavalcanti and Trigueiro, 2001; Trigueiro, Marques and Cunha, 2001; Aldrigue, 2012) in homes built from the 1950s to the 70s, the social sector – visitors’ and dining rooms – contains the most accessible spaces, as found in pre-modernist houses, but the exterior is not nearly as integrating as in eclectic (and some colonial) houses, and the master bedroom no longer holds its former privileged position in relation to other bedrooms, but retreats into the ‘private sector’, being part of a bush scheme off a hall that links to the social sector. Bedrooms cease to present alternative accesses (to other bedrooms or living rooms), becoming dead-end cells, or nearly so by only linking to a hall and perhaps to an en suite bathroom and/or a walk-in closet. The street and the maids’ bedroom are the most segregated spaces as in homes of previous times (figure 4). Ease of movement was one of the goals aimed at by the supporters of the Modern Movement in its heyday. The severing of the ‘private sector’ from all other sectors can hardly be felt in tune with those aims. Neither can the discourse behind the publicity advertisements of flats in Rio de Janeiro where this dwelling type was first adopted on a large scale in the 1930s, serving as a benchmark for the whole country, especially in the second half of the 20th century. Apartments were then a novelty that, alongside a range of urban transformations, signalled a new historical period marked by the contradictory circumstance (again, as befits Brazilian ways) of an authoritarian regime (the Vargas Era, 1930-1945) that supported the ideals of modernity as a means to keep pace with the developed world and, at the same time, legitimise unrestrained power. Space analysis of ground plans and text descriptions in advertisements announcing apartments for sale in the main local newspapers were related in a study (Cunha and Trigueiro, 2005) that focused on flats built in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s (when they started to be viewed as a dwelling option round the country), in the 1970s (when they spread to most large towns in the country, in the wake of an urban development boom), and in the 1990s (when they became the main dwelling option across regions and social groups). We found that in earlier times service-related spaces were an almost obligatory item in the advertisements. In the 1950s, 90% of ads mentioned servants’ accommodations, some with detailed descriptions of their generous sizes,

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and some informing of the presence of more than one such facility in the flat. In the 1970s service bedrooms were mentioned in 70% of ads, this percentage dropping to 62% in the 1990s; in the 1950s utility lobbies were mentioned in 32% of cases, but hardly ever from then on; kitchens were considered publicity items in 40% of ads in the 1950s, against only 22% and 10% in the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively. In the early cases, the most important reasoning was apparently that of convincing prospective buyers that moving to a flat would not mean parting with their domestic service comforts and ethos. It was just like living in a house. In the plans of flats built in the 1950s, servants’ quarters, though kept well out of the visitors’ eye, were often near at hand by way of interior passages in the private sector; an arrangement that tended to disappear in the 1970s. In the 1990s, servants’ rooms often vanished into the depths of a linear sequence of cells, becoming, therefore, more closely linked to the exterior – through the utility lobby – than to the home spaces (figure 5). This aspect is strongly emphasised by Cunha (2007) who found it to be a recurrent pattern in the later cases that are part of the extensive array of

Figure 4 – Plans and graph schemes of a modernist house displaying a segregated maid’s room set under the same roof. Figure 4

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flat plans examined in her doctoral thesis. By means of a thorough diachronic overview of flat plans designed from the 1930s to the last decade of the 20th century, she discusses the limits of the private and public realms and conjectures about how desirable the awareness concerning the presence of servants was. Barsted (1987) argues that, in the 1970s, when domestic labour started to be ruled by contractual bond that regulated rights and duties, it was deemed better if servants were invisible. Cunha asserts that, in the flat plans, when the door linking the kitchen to the social sector is closed it is as if the solidarity that bridges the worlds of masters and servants is lifted out and the two communities of inhabitants are allowed to regain their independence. Instead of comprising three sectors, it is as if the complex becomes reduced to a dichotomy of servants versus owners, granting that visitors, who are becoming fewer, are grouped with the nonservant residents. Also of note is a gradual reduction in the use of service-related spaces, which tend to become areas for tackling chores only, and these are more and more performed outside the domestic sphere as live-in servants give way to day cleaners that come in once or twice a week. In the 1970s and 80s the location of housemaids’ bedrooms, being adjacent to both the utility lobby and another transition space either in the social or private sector, enabled the appearance of the ‘reversible’ room (figure 6). This has remained a layout option to this day, perhaps anticipating a progressive reduction in the provision of servants’ quarters, for which the recent change in legislation might trigger the final act.

Figure 5 – Plans of flats built in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s displaying servants’ rooms gradually more set apart from the visitors’ entrance.

Figure 5

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d) Skipping / re-guising the servants’ room, or where has the maid gone? Here and there research findings point out the disappearance of servants’ rooms, especially when addressing 21st-century homes. In her doctoral thesis Griz (2012) examined flats in Recife, of which the originally conceived plans were altered to suit their owners’ needs. Housemaids’ rooms were suppressed altogether in a few cases, but the choice for maintaining them predominated in the sample, an attitude that indicates the intent to rely on domestic help for some time to come, thus confirming the tendency recorded in studies of late 20th-century Brazilian homes. Some aspects of present-day housing which manifest visibly in the built environment and seem to associate with new domestic requirements suggest a re-enactment of modernist proposals (i.e. the shrinking of servicerelated space) whereas others point towards a setback from them (enclosed semi-private communal areas strongly detached from the public space), and still others signal the emergence of novel themes (the home-based office). Marques investigated new ways of life in homes of Natal that could be associated with post-modernity, as extensively referred in the literature, such as those inhabited by single-parent families, restructured families, homebased working family heads. By means of empirical observations and open surveys she sought to ascertain how those dwellings were used as their occupants went about their daily routines. In the studied cases, bedrooms had become whole houses in themselves (França, 2001, found a similar situation in homes in Brasília), whereas dining rooms, though still kept as sacred icons of family gatherings, were seldom used by household members

Figure 6 – Flat plan displaying a maid’s bedroom that could open to both the social sector and/or the service sector.

Figure 6

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and/or visitors at one and the same time. Respondents stated that meals were often taken in self-service restaurants near work places, whereas receiving, when still occurring, took place in the ‘reception halls’ of buildings or condominiums or in ‘reception houses’, a sort of service facility that multiplies in most towns (Marques and Trigueiro, 2000). Tendencies found in houses built and/or converted in the last decades in Recife and Natal were confirmed and emphasized by the analysis of plans for middle-class residents in Rio de Janeiro by Cunha. Plans were analysed by the application of space syntax procedures (Trigueiro, Marques, Cunha, 2001) in order to investigate whether the hierarchy of accessibility showed traces of continuity or change with reference to Brazilian homes of previous time periods as well as to the original plans in the converted cases. In these, bedrooms as well as the exterior had become generally more segregated from all other spaces. In the newly built homes, bedrooms and particularly master bedrooms were even more segregated; en suite bathrooms proliferated, often coupled with a dressing closet. The growing complexity of the so-called private sector seemed contradictory insofar as the social sector became larger and more diverse, often with some bedrooms being knocked out to give way to multiple sitting arrangements. Although confirming the increasing segregation of the private sector in the apartments investigated in Rio, Cunha (2007) shows that bedrooms tended to shrink in area. The author proposes that this happened in order to allow for more space in the social sector, a repository of social prestige. As has already been mentioned here, in the early decades bedrooms could appear distributed throughout the plan, sometimes in close proximity to other functional cells, especially the master bedroom, retaining diverse levels of topological accessibility among them. As they became more insulated from the other functional sectors, they also became more symmetrical in relation to one another, thus indicating a reduction in the asymmetry of relations between parents and children. The syntactic analysis of plans disclosed how segregation was enhanced by means of successive breaking-up of space to form passages, corridors or hallways that create topological (and visual) distance in the routes to the private sectors, where bedrooms are articulated in a bush-like configuration. The area of the bedrooms themselves may be broken into a segmented entrance that accommodates the door swing and screens the bedroom interior (figure 7). Such design artifice bears parallels with Evans’s (1997) proposition of transition spaces as means of connecting as well as setting apart spaces and people in order to control encounter and avoidance. It also fragments the spatial experience – an important component of the individualisation process according to Velho. Singly (2000, p.18) points out that it is in the bedroom that family members build up their individualities from childhood while maintaining links of dependency with other family members. The symmetry of access concerning bedrooms may be perceived in this context of individuality, as these rooms become personalised worlds adjacent to one

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another. Morley (2000, p.90) upholds the view that these new intentions place bedrooms in a political-moral environment of ‘choice’ based on the desire for individual privacy rather than on the idea of home as a unity. This situation may also be viewed in the context of new familial compositions, whose diversity of interest makes it hard to conciliate routines. Hillier and Hanson (1984) argue that segregation is associated with differentiation. The self-contained worlds of bedrooms involve the individualisation of technologies that were formerly displayed in the social sphere for the communal use of family members. Individual communication technologies can redefine notions of proximity and intensify virtual relations at the expense of spatially defined ones, such as those within their own homes, as discussed by Virilio (1993). Cunha (2007) points out that the increased insulation of bedrooms also contributes to the redefinition of private/public boundaries within the domestic dominion. Because bedrooms may be viewed as a collection of

Figure 7 – Flat plans built for the middle classes in Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s, 50s and 90s showing that the area of the social sector tends to increase while that of bedrooms tends to shrink over time; a tendency for more privacy in the private sector is also shown.

Figure 7

spaces positioned in the segregated end of the accessibility scale, the social sector may pose as their antagonist, lying in the integrating end of the scale, ready to be shared by inhabitants. This polarised spatial scheme of individual reclusion versus community of inhabitants may be at the root of the diminishing interface between inhabitants and visitors – with inhabitants seemingly taking the part of visitors in the space. The redefinition of boundaries also affects the service sector, which tends to become topologically closer to the public space than to the private (or communal) domestic sphere. The way service spaces are configured – defining a linear sequence of cells in which each one exerts control of all following others – allows for the strategic positioning of doors that may sever

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all contact with the social and private sectors, leaving the rooms that are positioned at the end of the sequence – almost always the maid’s bedroom and en suite bathroom – accessible only to the utility (for laundry and cleaning materials) lobby and to the exterior. Although the spatial arrangements of both the private and the service sectors are designed to achieve isolation, the nature of this isolation is distinct as pointed out by Cunha (2007). Whereas that of the private sector provides for reclusion, that of the service sector signals exclusion, meaning not a desire for privacy on the part of its occupiers but on the part of the other inhabitants in relation to them. In the flat plans designed in the late 20th century some cases of alternative interior routes were found. These, however, would never link spaces mainly occupied by servants. In various flat and house plans that have served as the object of study in this essay, in the northeast and southeast regions of Brazil alike, master bedrooms and maids’ bedrooms are often adjacent, but their doors are set as far apart from one another as the remaining domestic spatial arrangement allows. Besides, master bedrooms tend to face east to south – the cooler quadrant – whenever possible, while maids’ bedrooms are often orientated towards the torrid afternoon sun of the tropics. And whereas master bedrooms have expanded into self-contained worlds, servants’ bedrooms have shrunk to little more than walk-in closets, often deprived of windows. Yet, the provision of a fairly comfortable room for a housemaid can backfire into not providing any room at all. On three occasions one of the authors of this essay (Trigueiro) designed houses in which some essential characteristics of the housemaid’s bedroom were subverted in three diverse (if related) ways: in case (1) the area of the maid’s room was the same as that of two of the other three bedrooms existing in the house, faced the same side of the plot as the other three, through a similar window, and bunched together with all others in a bush configuration off a corridor – though being furthest in metric distance from the social sector; in case (2) the maid’s room enjoyed a generous area facing the privileged view to the sea and receiving the dominant ventilation – though being connecting solely to the service sector and the exterior; in case (3) the maid’s room profited from an orientation towards the privileged side of the plot and an indirect connection to the social sector, albeit separated from the private sector located upstairs. The clients were all open-minded nice people. In two cases, somebody declared that their housemaid was “part of the family”. The buildings were all second homes for leisure and relaxation, a circumstance that tends to be associated with loose modes of behaviour. Plans were accepted and built accordingly. However, the outcome was that, in all cases, the maids could only enjoy the privilege if there was not a single extra soul to be lodged, a highly uncommon occurrence in a holiday house. In case (1) the maid would be pushed into the children’s bedroom (or any other corner where a hammock could be hung) as soon as a guest showed up; in the other cases, maids ended up being accommodated in spaces totally inappropriate for human habitation – a windowless

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compartment built for storage purposes by the swimming pool in case (2), and a makeshift shed orientated towards the hot afternoon sun in the backyard in case (3). Hammocks hanging in kitchens were also found in a middle-class high-rise condominium built in Natal in the 1990s. According to Loureiro and Marques (1999) the designer assumed that housemaids would be occasional workers so only a common bathroom and toilet facilities were offered on the ground floor of the communal area, whereas kitchens and utility lobbies were amalgamated and located next to the only entrance to the flat – an innovative feature considering that a ‘service’ and a ‘social’ entrance (often side-by-side) had always been viewed as obligatory requirements even in very small flats. In the cases examined by Marques and Loureiro, hammocks became the sleeping arrangement for the ubiquitous housemaids. Of maids and masters

It’s all but obligatory for middle and upper-class families in Brazil to employ a housemaid and the country has more domestic workers than any other. Gabriel Mascaro’s powerful and sensitive film Housemaids directly addresses this longunspoken issue, which some describe as one of the most prominent remnants of the country’s colonial past. (Comment about a film screening in Columbus, Ohio: http://www. artsinohio.com/event/housemaids-domestica-by-gabriel-mascaro-2012. Accessed 01/11/2014)

Although not in the least “a long-unspoken issue” – the subject has been explored in the literature at least since the early 20th century – the commentator’s assertion about the presence of a housemaid as an almost obligatory circumstance in Brazilian middle- and upper-class homes states the contours of our contemporaneity. The fine tuning of doors and walls to allow for mouldable spatial structures stretches back to colonial times – as has been demonstrated here – being more or less restricted, now and then, according to sociocultural circumstances, but always offering the means to cope with a history of extreme social inequality now over five centuries long. By flexing patterns of encounter and avoidance, those manoeuvres help to raise the ambiguity necessary to maintain such inequalities underneath a kind of social pact that, although exploding daily in the crime and violence of the streets, is mitigated by quasi-family relations within the domestic milieu. As exposed, recent trends herald the outline of what might be the typical 21st-century abode of the middling social groups in Brazil: the shrinking of service-related spaces plus the occasional disappearance of the servants’ quarters; bedrooms that encapsulate a home in itself as if the domestic complex were a set of independent dwelling units bunched together; the home-based office; the scarce use of a sometimes expanded

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social sphere even when retaining its traditional arrangement of livingplus-dining room suites. The apparent contradiction between increasing demands for privacy and enlarged social sectors – complete with ‘home theatres’ and ‘gourmet kitchens’ – seems to be more associated with the need for status display than with expectations of a richer social life, a fact that, although gaining specific nuances nowadays, has always permeated, in one way or another, the domestic space layout, albeit probably never at such a scale. On the other hand, the plasticity of some residential arrangements echoes the old debate about the “ideas out of place” versus “the ideas in place” (Schwarz, 1977; Franco, 1976) underlying the nature of sociocultural relations in Brazil, which seem to have been capable of accommodating liberal thought and slavery, neoclassicism and rusticity, landowner fathers and industrialist sons, modernism and dictatorship, housemaids who are considered ‘part of the family’ but may not sleep within the family spatial compound. It is exactly when flexibility and ease of movement are well stressed in the international discourse of the Modern Movement that Brazilian homes become less so. We are a country renowned for the immediate acceptance of the modernist formal repertoire across social and regional spheres. However, as Amorim (2008, p.324) points out, in Brazilian modern architecture flexibility is yet another myth. The present day spatial configuration may be pointing towards a new step in this saga: while some aspects suggest a re-enactment of what may be viewed as a search for “la maison moderniste perdue” (Marques and Trigueiro, 2000) or for contemporaneity, others point toward universal segregation in tune with the global obsession for privacy and virtual communication or for selective, occasional episodes of co-presence among dwellers (Holanda, 1999), which seems to have become ever more selective concerning contact with the housemaid.

Acknowledgements We thank: Beatriz Temtemples for helping to find references and illustrations CAPES and CNPq for financial support References Aldrigue, M. ‘Aparências da foma e forma do espaço’. Masters dissertation, Natal: PPGAU/UFRN, 2012. Almeida, Angela Mendes de (org.) et al. Pensando a família no Brasil: da colônia à modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Espaço e Tempo: UFRJ, 1987.

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Amorim, L. ‘The sector’s paradigm: a study of the spatial function and nature of modernist housing in Northeast Brazil’. Doctoral thesis. London: UCL, 1999. —. ‘Flexibilidade espacial: entre o princípio e o mito’. In Amorim, L., and Griz, C. (orgs). Cidades: urbanismo, patrimônio e sociedade. Olinda: Livro Rápido, 2008, pp.297-326. Barsted, Leila Linhares. In Almeida, Angela Mendes de (org.) et al. Pensando a família no Brasil: da colonização à modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Espaço e Tempo: UFRJ, 1987. Cavalcanti, A., and Trigueiro, E. ‘Granny’s home was not exactly like daddy’s home’. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Space Syntax Symposium. Atlanta: GeorgiaTech., 2001, pp.59.1-59.7. Cunha, V. ‘Between Domesticity and Society: Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe compared’. Masters dissertation. University College London, 1992. —. ‘Espaço e Sociedade: classe média habitando apartamentos no Rio de Janeiro no século XX’. Tese de Doutorado. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2007. Cunha, V., and Trigueiro, E. ‘Towards a diachronic panorama of apartment living in Brazil’. In Proceedings of the 5th International Space Syntax Symposium. Delft: TuDelft, 2005, pp.29-42. Evans, R. ‘Figures, doors and passages’. In Translations from drawings to buildings and other essays. London: Architectural Association, 1997, pp.54-91. França, F. C. ‘Meu quarto, meu mundo: configuração espacial e modo de vida em casas de Brasília’. Masters dissertation. Brasília: FAU/UnB, 2001. Franco, M.S.C. ‘As idéias estão no lugar’. In Cadernos de Debates, no. 1, São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1976. Freyre, G. Sobrados e mucambos. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1981. Griz, C. ‘Quando o luxo é necessário’. Doctoral thesis. Recife: MDU/UFPE, 2012. Hanson, J. Decoding homes and houses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hillier, B., and Hanson, J. The social logic of space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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Holanda, F. ‘Uma casa-átrio moderna. Cadernos Eletrônicos da Pós, Brasília:UNB, vol. 1, no. 1, 1999. Housemaids (2013) – Publication open call on domestic work in Brazil, Available at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxN88w7IrzPf TmFBMm9HRFBoTXc/edit?usp=sharing. Loureiro, C., and Marques, S. ‘Morar novo, cenário antigo’. Paper presented at ANPUR, Porto Alegre, 1999. Margolis, M. ‘Maids and masters: a new law is designed to move those downstairs upward’. Newsweek, April 29, 2013. Marques, S., and Trigueiro, E. ‘A la recherche de la maison moderniste perdue’. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Docomomo Conference, Brasília - The Modern City facing the future. Brasília: UFBA/UNB, 2000, pp.41-49. Morley, David. Home territories: media, mobility and identity. New York: Routledge, 2000. Trigueiro, E. ‘Change (and continuity) in domestic space design’. Doctoral thesis. London: UCL, 1994. Trigueiro, E., Marques, S. and Cunha, V. ‘The mystery of the social sector’. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Space Syntax Symposium. Atlanta: Georgia Tech., 2001, pp.40.1-40.10. Schwarz, R. ‘As idéias fora do lugar’. In Ao vencedor as batatas: forma literária e processo social nos inícios do romance brasileiro. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977. Singly, François de. In Peixoto, Clarice Ehlers, Singly, François de and Cicchelli, Vincenzo (orgs). Familia e individualização. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2000. Smith, R. ‘Arquitetura civil do período colonial’. In Arquitetura Civil II. São Paulo: FAUUSP/MEC-IPHAN, 1981. Vauthier, L. ‘Casas de residência no Brasil’. In Arquitetura Civil I. São Paulo: FAUUSP/MEC-IPHAN, 1981. Virilio, P. ‘O Espaço Crítico; e as perspectivas em tempo real’. Edição revista e aumentada pelo autor. Pires, Paulo Roberto (trans.). Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1993.

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Geographies of inequality: Peruvian household workers navigate spaces of servitude by Katherine Maich Katherine Maich is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley with a background in Labor Studies. Her research analyzes the racialized, gendered, and classed practice of domestic work in Latin America and the US. Katherine is a member of the Research Network for Domestic Worker Rights and she collaborates with the International Domestic Workers Federation. She would like to thank her family for their support during this research, and dedicates this article to the memory of her uncle, Peter Maich. this article was produced as part of an open call organized in partnership with myrdle court press (www.myrdlecourtpress.net) and the federal university of pernambuco (www. ufpe.br). the article was also published in the online magazine aquitextos (vitruvius) & the book critical cities volume iv.

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They eat meat, and you say to them: “Could you give me a bit of meat for my rice?” “No, there are eggs over there,” they tell you, “there are eggs in the fridge.” And they get the meat.

Juana, 28, household worker, Cusco Se necesita chica para casa. Cama a dentro. (Girl needed for house. Live in.)

Paseo de la República, Lima, Peru, November 2012 Introduction

Peru1 is currently understood as one of the fastest growing neo-liberal economies in South America, one whose wealth and political power is highly concentrated in the capital, creating an incredibly centralized nation and fueling a massive rural to urban labor migration. Peru’s history is a storied and profound one, as along with India, China, Mesoamerica, Egypt and Mesopotamia, Peru is considered a “cradle of civilization”.2 Just north of Lima, the city-state of Caral is now understood to be the site of a highly organized and complex society dating back to 2600 BC, well beyond 4,000 years prior to the more popularly recognized Incan construction of Machu Picchu, near Cusco. Centuries later, after years of trade relations, geographical fluctuation and fluidity between numerous indigenous cultures during many epochs – including the Pre-Ceramica, Inicial de la Ceramica, Formativa, Auge, Fusional and Imperial periods – the Spanish Conquista era began after Francisco Pizarro took Atahualpa, the Incan king, and occupied Tumbes in northwest Peru. Through violence and cooptation, the Spanish colonists extended and enforced their power throughout Peru, concentrating resources and wealth in the capital of Lima, la Ciudad de los Reyes, or City of the Kings. Thus, an entirely new system of colonization took hold, shifting forever the trajectory of Peru as well as other nearby occupied lands throughout the entire continent. Indigenous cultures were systematically exploited and purposefully undermined as a result of European colonialism. Land was stolen and preColumbian tribute systems were altered as the members of the indigenous population (usually women) were subjected to practices of repartimiento by paying tribute to the encomendero, who extracted funds and labor from those subjected to this colonial legal system.3 Lacking other economic alternatives,

katherine maich

1 For the purposes of this paper, the colonial name Peru is used to describe the lands in this particular western region of South America. The name was ‘bestowed’ onto this land in 1522 by the Spanish Crown who first called these Incan lands ‘Peru’ after Biru, an indigenous ruler who lived in the region that is now called the ‘Bay of San Miguel’. This name was ‘legalized’ in 1529 when the Spanish Crown designated the captured lands as the province of Peru. Under Spanish occupation, the lands were first called Viceroyalty of Peru, which then became the Republic of Peru after the later Peruvian War of Independence. 2 Museo Larco, Lima, Peru. http://www. museolarco.org/ coleccion/culturas-ymapas-del-tiempo/ 3 Socolow, Susan Migden. The Women of Colonial Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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indigenous women were often forced into providing servicio personal, or domestic service, in the homes of Spaniards where their bodies were regularly subjected to physical, sexual and verbal abuse of the colonial domain. Criollo (of Spanish descent) political leaders José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar are often thought of as ‘liberators’ of parts of South America and Peru though the Peruvian War of Independence of 1821, though in fact they also utilized violence to further their own self-interest in contested power struggles over land, wealth and resources, thus casting suspicion on their quest for ‘independence’. Frustrated with having to confer with the Crown in the ‘old world’ and with sharing the spoils of the occupation, the Spanish settlers revolted. The Crown was determined not to lose the profits and resources that they had become accustomed to, and thus a bloody and brutal war began. By gaining independence from the Crown, the Spanish settlers obtained the power and control of the occupied lands for themselves. Though this year marked the establishment of an official ‘independence’, Peru was still reeling from forced cultural, religious, political, social and economic changes enacted by the colonists and settlers. Thus, this colonial history lives on through its contemporary legacy, and the practice of domestic work is one example of the continuity between a colonized past and a contemporary, colonized present. As Susan Socolow (2000) notes: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries young Indian women were taken from their villages to work as domestics in nearby urban centers. By the eighteenth century, the opportunity for domestic employment was a major factor in attracting poor rural women to the city… throughout the colonial period, in-migration of female domestic labor, whether forced or voluntary, was a major factor in producing a sexual imbalance in the region’s urban population. Domestic service drew young single women to the city and provided employment for up to 75 percent of them.

4 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001; Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. ‘From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuity in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor’. Signs, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp.1-43

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Due to the effects of geopolitical shifts, forced migration and rapid urbanization throughout the country in the years since, economic opportunities continue to remain sparse in the rural reaches of Peru and thus many indigenous internal migrants are forced to relocate and find work as trabajadoras del hogar (household workers) in Lima. However, just as during the era of official colonial rule, once there, they are situated within an extremely vulnerable and isolated context. These women’s work is highly gendered, private and contained within the intimate space of the home, where threats of verbal, emotional and sexual abuse, isolation and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender and class continue to persist in daily life.4 Profoundly deep, entrenched European colonial relations persist in the apartments and homes across wealthy districts of the capital, yet meanwhile contemporary Limeño society considers itself as moving ‘ever so forward’ by pushing costly ‘modernization’ projects, developing its booming tourist industry and promoting its global culinary fame. It is thus important

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to note that much of the tourism draw caters to English-speaking, wealthy vacationers from the West, mainly traveling from the United States, Canada and the UK. A number of back-packers also circulate throughout the country, staying in cheap hostels and teaching English or volunteering with nonprofit organizations. However, Peru’s tourist push encourages the bulk of moneyed tourists to visit the indigenous sites of, among others, Caral, Cusco, Sacsayhuaman, Machu Picchu, Chan Chan and other re-discovered, ‘unspoiled’ lands of the pre-Incan Lima, Moche, Chimu and Incan civilizations. Tourist companies approach Iquitos as a means to exoticize the selva (forest) and its residents, with all-inclusive packages boasting “brief sightseeing of Iquitos, boat trip by the Amazon River, lodging in 2 jungle lodges, meals, visit to Yagua natives, hikes, shamans, birdwatching, canoe ride, dolphin spotting and more.”5 However, that tourist money is siphoned back into profit-ventures and private companies, as the Moche’s Huaca de la Luna excavation in Trujillo is on hold due to lack of national funds, though condominium construction continues across the street from Huaca Pucllana in densely populated Miraflores, with only a small strip of asphalt separating pre-Incan ruins from the new marble floors of the upper class. “You don’t even have to trek into the Andes,” Time Magazine states in its review of the top ‘10 Things to Do in Lima’. Indeed, an upscale restaurant shares the property of the ruins, serving ‘haute cuisine’ “to make your visit even better… [t]here’s nothing like dining while taking in 1,500-year-old views”.6 My intervention and position

As a sociologist and worker rights advocate in the US, I first traveled to Peru in 2011 and reached out to household worker organizations and unions in order to learn about the effects of the household workers’ law, Ley de los Trabajadores del Hogar, passed on May 12, 2003 by the Peruvian Congress under President Alejandro Toledo, the first indigenous president to be democratically elected in Peru’s history. My previous experience with domestic workers (including working as a job dispatcher at an immigrant worker center in the Mission District of San Francisco, California in 2008-2009, organizing with domestic workers in Guatemala City, Guatemala, between 2009-2011 in order to challenge the state for the implementation of the recently passed maternity coverage law, and eventually volunteering with a domestic employer organization in New York and California from 2012-2014 that seeks to enforce codes of conduct among domestic employers) had revealed that most household workers are denied basic labor rights, and therefore, I wanted to study how and when the law could matter for this particular population of workers in the home. After years of organizing by domestic worker groups and women’s organizations, the final version of the household workers law after several iterations specifies for working conditions for domestic workers around privacy in the home, proposes schedules for frequency of salary, guarantees vacation time and social security benefits, and

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5 Paseos Amazonicas. ‘Amazon Jungle Tours’. http://www. paseosamazonicos.com/ amazon_tours.htm.

Chauvin, Lucien. ‘10 Things to Do in Lima’. Time Magazine. See: http://content. time.com/time/ travel/cityguide/ article/0,31489,197754 8_1977464_1977441,00. html.

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7 Collins, P.H. ‘Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought’. Social Problems, vol. 33, no. 6, 1986. Special Theory Issue: S14-S32. 8 Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp.575-599; Mahmood, Saba. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2005; Naples, Nancy. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2003.

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obligates employers to pay for educational access for school-age workers (though child domestic workers are prohibited below the age of 14). However, the law does not specify a minimum wage for domestic workers as it does for all other recognized workers in Peru. Domestic workers are only granted half of the vacation days of other workers – 15 days rather than a full month – and they are not required to receive a formal written contract (the contract can either be in written or, much more common, verbal format) with their employer. Instead, the law stipulates that a domestic workers’ wage is only legally required to be “of mutual accord”, which frequently creates a situation in which young migrant girls from the provincias work for extremely low (and sometimes no) wages in Lima. Yet since ethnographic research has historically been problematic and oppressive, I paid attention to situated-ness and embedded power structures while employing a critical feminist lens to my positionality as an attempt to confront the problematic past, paying keen attention to the insider/outsider lines of differentiation and racial, economic and social power.7 Bound up within our varied standpoints or ‘lifeworlds’ are lines of advantage, privilege and difference, and they are enacted differently in particular contexts, especially with regard to the power dynamics of conducting research.8 As Nancy Naples cautions, “[f ]eminist ethnographers [must] emphasize the significance of locating and analyzing particular standpoints in differing contexts to explicate relations of domination embedded in communities and social institutions” (2003, p.21). With that reflexivity in mind, I positioned myself as a labor researcher and PhD candidate in sociology with a focus on labor and gender when establishing contact with the groups in the hopes of gaining organizational access, clearly expressing my politics and interest in advancing domestic worker rights. I also used social networks of Limeño and extranjero (expatriate) friends and contacts, inquiring as to whether I could meet and, if granted her consent, interview their current or former household worker. This privileged access was predicated upon exercising my social capital ‘correctly’ with these employers to explain my project in a non-threatening, diplomatic way, and when successful, allowed me to speak with workers who were isolated and largely unaware of the existence of these domestic worker organizations. Wearing my blue chaleca (jacket) from El Hogar de Rosita, one of the prominent household worker advocacy organizations, I also approached domestic workers in parks where they often gathered together to care for their employer’s children, parents or dogs and to create social space. The intersectionality of my education capital, social class and race was complicated in Lima; as a highly educated, middle-class (by Lima standards – I rented my own apartment in a well-off district), white, non-native Spanishspeaking woman from a university in California, I enjoyed a great deal of access, as nearly everyone opened up to share a story about their thoughts on the household workers’ law. These stories, spoken from the lived experience of domestic workers, advocates, lawyers and employers spoke to each other’s

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experiences and built on each other to demonstrate particular themes, revealing how geography and architecture delineate neighborhoods, space inside the home, and even how and what food is consumed, thus reproducing the deep roots of colonial relations inside middle- and upper-class Limeño homes. In highly centralized Peru, this is demonstrated in a number of ways: it is lived out through race and class relations, limitations on or access to future trajectories, and via spatial relations, with space as both a social construct and as a material manifestation of power. Additionally, my paper examines implications of attempts to regulate these relations, since over ten years ago Peru passed national labor protections for household workers, though with negligible improvements in their lives. The law holds tremendous internal contradictions, yet it potentially presents a challenge to longstanding colonial legacies that permeate intimate labor relations in the home. How do the implementation and specifics of legislation come to bear on the lives of those it attempts to protect, offer benefits to, or bring into political inclusion? The law can seem like a very distant tool of privilege rather than of justice when lived out as only a formality. Thus, I begin by asking, can the law intervene? How and when, and with what consequences? However, because this law is premised upon a legal system that is colonial in nature, I also ask, whose law is this, who does it belong to, and who does it ‘protect’ – those populations it regulates, or in fact, those in positions of power who shaped the law to their own benefit? My contribution here allows us to utilize a case study of domestic work to investigate how a colonial legal system fails to work for the benefit of those it was originally designed to oppress. This paper thus explores the profoundly deep, entrenched nature of colonial relations within contemporary Limeño society, highlighting the gendered, racialized and class-based practices of household work and child labor. Based on ten months of in-depth interviews and participant observationbased fieldwork in Lima between 2012-2014, driven by the desire to understand and interrogate the dynamics of household labor in its current form in Lima, I thus investigate the nature of these spatial divisions that mark distinctions of discrimination in the street, home and body. With my research, I hope to lay bare the embedded structural racism at play in Lima, demonstrating that much needs to be done in a quest to end oppressive practices as colonialism lives on. Colonial relations lived out: paso a paso, sip by sip, bite by bite

Geography and architecture segregate everything – from that which is within the home for cama adentro (live-in) workers, to which neighborhoods household workers populate when living cama afuera (living out), to the particular elevator or door they take to enter their employer’s home, and even down to the spoon, fork, knife, table and quality and quantity of food used for meals. As Cecilia, a 52-year-old household worker

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from Jumbilla in the province of Bongará, emphatically told me one Sunday afternoon in February: Yes, there is, there is discrimination… for example, in the home! You can’t sit on the furniture of the employers, you can’t eat in the dining room of the employers, you can’t use anything, you have to use your own bathroom. To eat, you have your own plate, and separate spoon. You can’t use theirs. You have to enter the apartment through the service door if the house has one. You can’t go through the main entrance, or otherwise, it’s bad… (Cecilia, 52) Cecilia’s mention of “entras por la puerta de servicio, si la casa tiene (enter the apartment through the service door, if the house has one)” illuminates the importance of architecture in the reproduction of colonial relations inside the home. While some homes and apartments do not have a separate service entrance, most do, and others have separate ascensores de servicio (service lifts) specifically for the maids and other workers, while the apartment residents themselves enjoy the privilege of an exclusive elevator. Other structural issues of apartment design affect how predominately indigenous workers occupy the space itself, as Cecilia continued: Now the apartments are smaller. If they don’t have a room, we change in the ironing room, that’s where we change. Each time the houses are getting smaller… and to use the private employer’s bathroom is impossible. Yes, this is the problem now. In many houses they just don’t let maids use the bathroom… because, well, they have their reasons. Well, sometimes they think we are sick with the plague, or that we are going to steal things. (Cecilia, 52) Suspected theft is prevalent in discourses around trust with employers, though laced with irony as these employers themselves, usually criollo (of Spanish descent), are the contemporary ‘settlers’ squatting on land violently appropriated by their European ancestors from the very indigenous people subjected to working in the intimate space of the home. Cecilia’s obligation to eat with a separate plate and spoon for the domestic worker, set aside from the family’s cutlery, signifies deep-rooted hierarchy and racialized fear around ‘mixing’ and ‘contamination’ of a ‘lower’ racial group. Further employer discourses are laden with these racialized stereotypes around cleanliness and character directed at women from the provincias (provinces), reminiscent of racial segregation and Jim Crow legislation in the US in the mid-20th century. This racist legislation designated specific, lesser-quality space and facilities solely to be utilized by black people in the US, just as predominantly brown and black domestic workers are relegated to using certain bathrooms, sitting on certain furniture, and eating off of their own plates, lest they potentially ‘touch’ the employers’ belongings – except to clean them, of course.

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Thus, the paradox continues, as those who must ‘do the dirty work’ of cleaning up other peoples’ messes and restore impeccable order again to the home are considered themselves ‘dirty’, ‘sick’ or ‘lesser’. As Frantz Fanon remarks: “The perpetrator is the black man; Satan is black; one talks of darkness; when you are filthy you are dirty – and this goes for physical dirt as well as moral dirt” (p.165). This is reminiscent of Edward Said’s reminder that there are no ‘empty’ spaces in the world; that which is symbolically represented as shadowed or dark is equated with dirt, gloom, despair, lack of worth and filth. “You would be surprised at the number of expressions that equate the black man with sin,” Fanon remarks. And yet this extends into the realm of consciousness and morality as well – with a “dark/bad=black” and “light/good=white” division occurring; Fanon explains: “Moral consciousness implies a kind of split, a fracture of consciousness between a dark and a light side. Moral standards require the black, the dark, and the black man to be eliminated from this consciousness” (p.170). This contradictory position is embodied in the domestic workers who are considered ‘unclean’ and ‘untrustworthy’ by their employers yet are responsible for cleaning these very peoples’ most intimate spaces. Cecilia’s words also point to changing design structures of homes, apartments and condominiums for workers. As apartment sizes grow smaller, workers are the ones whose bodies must be flexible as they make accommodations, such as changing into their uniforms in the laundry room or foregoing use of the bathroom during the entire day’s shift, often of 12 hours or more. Another interviewee, Juana, described similar situations regarding restricted food and nutrition, and being forced to eat food of a lower quality than the food she prepared for her employer’s family. Live-in workers are highly dependent upon eating food inside their employer’s home as they spend the entirety of their existence there, save for the legally required, yet not necessarily granted, rest day (usually Sundays). The household workers’ law also stipulates that employers must provide accommodation and nutrition for their workers according to the level of financial comfort the employer enjoys. However, the kind of food household workers are ‘allowed’ to eat, as well as how it is consumed, exemplifies further the normalization of devaluation of household workers inside their employers’ homes. Yes. But the treatment was awful, and they don’t give you dinner or a snack, for instance. I only have breakfast and lunch until the following day that… you wake up at 5:30 in the morning without any fruit, without… just lunch until the next day. Yes, so you have to work in the house without dinner. And they don’t appreciate you, you see… And if there are sandwiches, if you serve the table… for some reason not many people show up, and sometimes some of the guests only eat the ham or the meat and leave the bread, no? So the boss tells you: “Eat the leftover bread” when the guest has already eaten the ham, or has eaten another part… That is abuse! (Juana)

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Other women described being only allowed to drink tea as breakfast in the morning while preparing a large meal for the employer’s family, or being told to eat chicken bones, or nothing at all. Lidia, 48, from San Pedro de Lloc in the region of La Libertad along the northern coast of Peru, told me about the worst part of her job, the impossible expectations of employers and cost displaced onto workers: Sometimes, the poor girl has to be Wonder Woman, even if she’s sick, she needs to show up every day, but there is a limit, isn’t there? And it’s a big sacrifice on us. And they exploit us. (Lidia, 48, from San Pedro de Lloc) These comments and experiences point to the deep internalization of racism which views the domestic worker as existing as a corporeal being, having the very basic human needs of hunger and thirst, occasional illness, and yet having no other means of recourse to address these needs while positioned inside the employer’s home. Herlinda, 51 years old and from Cajamarca, echoed these sentiments of being trapped and left with only substandard sustenance:

But… they don’t leave me anything to eat. They don’t tell me if there’s meat, eggs or anything in the fridge. And if I touched it, on Sunday they ask: “I left a bit of steak there, have you touched it?” Imagine that. So, she protested a day where I ate a bit of chicken, the employer. I told her: “Señora, there was nothing to eat for lunch, I ate it.” Because I stayed to wash the babies’ clothes, their room, bedroom, toy room, I was cleaning everything until three o’clock… She complained that why had I done with the chicken! So, from then on I didn’t touch anything. She told me: “There is pasta; you could have done something with butter.” What is pasta with butter? Just pasta and fry them with butter, nothing else. (Herlinda, 51, from Cajamarca) “What is pasta with butter?” speaks to the irony of the fact that Herlinda is expected to cook delicious, nutritious and satisfying meals for the family, but the employer (who would most likely fire Herlinda if she served the family pasta with butter) demonstrates that she believes Herlinda to be deserving of less – less quality, less food, less nourishment, less dignity as a human being. Deeply rooted race and class differentials take hold through the kind of meal that is offered, how it is made available, and the visual class distinctions taking hold through what food is eaten, how it is served, and where it is consumed (‘servants’ quarters’ vs. the main, centralized family kitchen space). inequality through design

For an empirical example of the way that space is constructed to reproduce these geographies of inequality, a Peruvian artist of Spanish descent, Daniela Ortiz de Zevallos, utilized her racial and class position to create a project

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entitled Maids’ Rooms, or Habitaciones de Servicio. She was inspired by her employment filming a wealthy family’s vacations in Asia, a popular beach resort near Lima, where she witnessed the marked distinctions in terms of space and clothing in the exclusive setting, as young, wealthy children frolicked on the beach and she followed her instructions to “take care to ensure no housemaids appeared in the footage”.9 The contradictory role of housemaids – absolutely required to do the work of caring for children and yet made invisible and never-remembered through zero presence in the video footage – captured the imaginary of Ortiz, who launched several artistic projects exploring these ramifications of subtle and overt racist practices against domestic workers in Peru. She examined the geographical layout of 60 homes in Lima constructed between 1930-2012 through photographs, blueprints of the floor plan layout, and then a spatial comparison of the dimensions of the service quarters in comparison to the other bedrooms. These homes are not tabula rasas; they are the foundation of historical patterns of racist discrimination and servitude. Ortiz’s decolonial project attempts to highlight and challenge the implications of elite architectural practices as they replicate and re-inscribe colonial relationships in the home.

9 Exposito, Marcelo. Essay available at: http://marceloexposito. net/pdf/exposito_ danielaortiz_en.pdf.

Figure 1 - Casa Rycroft, constructed in Lima in 1937 (Daniela Ortiz) Figure 1

Figure 2

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Figure 2 - As compared to Casa La Isla, constructed in Lima in 2007 (Daniela Ortiz)

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As Edward Said reminds us, “[d]ecolonization is a very complete battle over the course of different political destinies, different histories and geographies, and it is replete with works of the imagination, scholarship, and counter-scholarship” (p.219). Benjamin Orlove (1993) similarly notes in his article on race, geography and ‘postcolonial Peru’ that “colonial orderings emphasized historicized racial differences among persons within a relatively balanced and homogeneous space, while postcolonial orderings stressed naturalized regional differences among places within a homogeneous, though covertly racialized, population” (p.301). This social and political Peruvian landscape in relation to the racialized hierarchies is still blatantly at work in contemporary culture in the following manner – denoting space according to value among the most elite homes 80 years ago and today. The absolute continuity of the size of servants’ quarters from 1937 to 80 years later, as well as the distance between the ‘servant’s room’ and the rest of the home, remains striking. Furthermore, separate entrances denote a value distinction, as household workers must enter by the service entrance, unless an employer specifies otherwise. Indeed, even in the most modern construction projects happening across Lima’s districts of San Isidro, La Molina, Surco, Miraflores and Jesus Maria, large-scale condominiums and high-rise apartments still include a service quarter in the floor plan, complete with an attached, closet-like bathroom and often no windows. Ortiz presented her work formally, but also, in guerilla fashion, distributed copies of a poster from the installation that read: “Habitaciones de Servicio. No hay excusa para su ubicacion y dimensiones (Servants’ Quarters. There is no excuse for the location and dimensions)” around Lima and architecture schools in an attempt to disseminate a critique of the normalized maltreatment of household workers, confined to live in tiny pockets of these spacious homes they maintain in pristine condition. Delineation of space: the two worlds of peru

During my Spanish lesson this afternoon, we were practicing the imperative. My teacher, Rocio, told me to use as an example how I would talk to my empleada (housemaid)… you know, what commands I would give her. (Johanna, 31, French Canadian volunteering and working in Lima) Beyond the structure of household and designed inequality, discourses carrying racism, classism and gender-based discrimination flow freely and pervasively around the city. Johanna’s teacher, Rocio, a Peruvian with strong Andean features who teaches Spanish lessons to visiting tourists and expatriates, urged her to get comfortable with the imperative tense by imagining a conversation with her maid. In this exercise, Johanna, a white woman visiting Lima is taught how to ‘command’ a fictional domestic worker, revealing how culturally acceptable it is to speak to household workers as though they are a subordinate class. Additionally, it demonstrates the perhaps

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reluctant, complicated complicity that Rocio has in equipping foreigners with linguistic tools that perpetuate discriminatory discourses in attempts to relate or show classed and racial alignment with her clients. These discourses become materialized with regard to the limited future options domestic workers in Lima have due to the nature of their work being contained inside the home. I sat outside on the fenced-in shady front lawn of Cristiana, a Limeña friend who has worked in domestic worker advocacy and empowerment for years, while she nursed her 13-month-old and we talked about these limitations placed on domestic workers in Lima. She mused about Lima’s dual-class society in terms of the way that specific job placement allows for particular access to education, decent pay, security and advancement as a future, versus no access to those options. A 37-year-old organizer who has run theater groups, population education workshops and reproductive rights courses with adolescent and adult household workers for the last ten years, Cristina remarked, “There are two worlds in Lima. There is the world of the household workers, and there is the world of their employers.” Discussing these two worlds further, she elaborated about the lack of possibilities for any kind of educational advancement while living in the home of employers.

What you have here is that issues of discrimination and racism come together. Look, domestic work is a profession, is a job, where racism and discrimination come together as part of it. This isn’t the case in other kinds of work.

Similarly, a longtime feminist lawyer and domestic worker advocate from Lima, Vanessa, conveyed how inherent racism is within Limeño society. Her organization works to raise consciousness around the household workers’ law, though this racism along with gendered and class-based discrimination continues, as seen specifically through household labor: Racism is very strong in America Latina. Speaking of the importance of decolonizing relations of power, racism is a heavy part of this relationship. It isn’t just class exclusion, but also race, and gender. For this reason, the job of household work demonstrates more than any other the intersection of oppressions. I believe this is a really important dimension to domestic work, because it speaks to the type of work, the type of employment situation, the type of home, the space of the home, and the type of society we have. In the same way that Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, understands the power imbued in language – how speaking French presumes the collective consciousness of the French, including all of its overt and covert racism – those who speak Spanish as either a first or second language (with an indigenous language being primary) point to another moment of colonial distinction. Fanon posits: “To speak means to be in a position to

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use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (1952, p.18). Vanessa’s comment about household workers’ oppression demonstrating a particular kind of society is powerful, hearkening to Fanon’s notion of the collective unconscious (“the sum of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a given group”) being culturally acquired (rather than genetically) and thus re-inscribed through the reproduction of these oppressive relations in the home. This intersection of oppression is demonstrated on the streets, when workers wear pure white or light blue uniforms while pushing strollers or walking dogs, and it also becomes further manifested in their treatment within the home. In addition to indigenous Peruvians being demeaned as campesinas (peasants), chicas (chicks), and muchachas (girls) (for instance, household workers being called ‘girls’ even when they are well into their 50s and 60s) and other terms of disrespect, while the utter, requisite respect of Señor (Sir), Señorita (Miss) and Señora (Madam) is demanded at all times (and so ingrained that nearly anyone else they encounter, except a fellow household worker, becomes a Miss or a Sir). In addition to their darker skin color and Andean features, language also functions to further denote inaccessibility to colonial modes of thought, practices and cultural understandings. This is witnessed throughout Lima’s civil society, as domestic workers are regularly restricted from entering private clubs and even certain beaches. These racialized tropes are holdovers of colonial-era delineations of space that preserved certain areas for criollo privilege, and they manifest themselves in dress code requirements. Even those indigenous Peruvians wearing the most on-trend, expensive clothing, who show up at exclusive clubs with an attractive ensemble of friends, are often socially discouraged and denied entry. A young Limeño friend told me a story of covering up his friend’s denial at a club by pretending that they were both too drunk to enter in an effort to protect his friend’s feelings against the normalization of racist policies that allow this abusive system to continue. Regulating marginality, regulating discrimination? la ley y los descontentos (the law and its discontents)

“Amiga, tu nombre (Friend, your name)?” Roselia, a former housemaid who began working at the age of seven in her hometown of Cajamarca, smiled and kindly asked. “Luz, como… (Light, like…,” the 16-year-old household worker gestured up at the dim light, flickering high above us in the old home in Lima’s Jesus Maria district, El Hogar de Rosita. “Luz, ok, perfecto, de Huaraz (Luz, ok, perfect, from Huaraz).” Roselia, who now runs advocacy programs and workshops for newly migrated household workers, jotted a couple of notes down and moved on to the next worker, also young, also from the provinces. Aprons and gorros (caps) still in place from the morning’s cooking class, the group of nine household workers from the south, the mountains and the

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forests gathered around the table together to discuss the 18 articles of Law 27986, the Peruvian Household Workers Law. Roselia works with thousands of domestic workers each year, some of who are new to Lima and fresh from the provinces while others have lived and worked in other peoples’ homes for years. As the group talked about the law together, Isabel, also from Cajamarca, commented on some of the internal contradictions. Hmm… the law says one thing and it is impossible for the employer to follow. For example, say the person should work for 8 hours – this can never happen! Never. If you get up at 7 in the morning and start to work, you cannot be done yet; working until 7 is 12 hours. No, it’s impossible. This part of the law is really bad… (Isabel, 29, from Cajamarca) As I discuss elsewhere (Maich, 2014), Isabel’s recognition of the fact that working hours can hardly be regulated inside the home points to a failure of the state to recognize the constant, repetitive, eternal nature of reproductive labor. However, in the last ten years, Peru has joined the growing number of South American countries advancing laws for formerly unrecognized and unprotected workers, a modern twist on a law that usually prefers to look the other way regarding housemaids (Blofield, 2012). Only 0.1% of those workers enjoy the protections of a written contract, however (Conferencia sobre el Convenio 189 del OIT, 2012). Other women attending the law workshop tell stories of internal migration, a common factor shaping the lives of those leaving the provinces to find work in Lima. As Aimalinda, a 27-year-old from Huancabamba informed me, she left her family in the highlands of la provincia of Piura tucked in the far eastern edges of the country and migrated to Lima at age 13, where she lived with and worked for the same family until age 19. “And how were your relationships with your employers?” I asked. She instantly described the slavery-like treatment that she suffered for seven years. “Ellos no me pagaban (They didn’t pay me),” Aimalinda explained. They didn’t pay her because they were providing her a place to live far from her own, because she didn’t have to pay rent since she lived with the family, even though of course she was living only to work constantly for the family. Now things are better; from 3pm to 8pm Aimalinda takes classes, but during the day she cares for her employer’s young child and 90-year-old grandmother. “She’s equal to a baby,” Aimalinda mused. The benefit to her of ‘living in’ is that she doesn’t have to worry about commuting for 1-2 hours each way from the poorer districts of Lima to the center of the capital, i.e., the districts where the majority of wealthy employers are concentrated. Yet now Aimalinda makes S/.400 per month (roughly US$160), clearly more than her nonexistent salary of seven years, yet still less than half of the already low Peruvian minimum wage. The law can do nothing for Aimalinda with regard to this payment, since all that it requires is a mutual agreement between the employers and the employed, vs. a set, defined bottom floor.

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El Hogar de Rosita takes on the task of diffusing information to women working and hidden within the inside of the home, new to the sprawling, chaotic city of Lima’s 43 districts, and yet all too familiar with mistreatment, either by relatives or strangers. They run a radio program at 8am on Saturdays about the workshops, decent jobs and sense of community offered at this little oasis on a quiet side street in a working-class district of Lima. They recognize that these women have been disciplined to accept poor working conditions and justification for abuse and lack of pay because of the structural setup of migration and dependency, while architecture and employment practices continue to reproduce dynamics of colonial relations. Truly, this population has been disciplined, scattered and dissipated, this “compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways” (Foucault, 1977). Lima’s future: Modernizing inequality?

So as more and more material wealth becomes crystallized in the hands of the elite, the more domestic work becomes deeply entrenched and the more extreme, polarized race relations that recall ongoing colonial policies, practices, approaches and understandings are further ingrained. The pervasive nature of structural inequality remains, lived out through the street, the home and the body. In thinking about attempts of an oppressed, subjugated population to move toward full social and political inclusion, the law is not enough to right centuries of wrongs and to launch structural challenges against deeply embedded racism. The law remains one tool among many that fails these internal migrant household workers confronting Lima’s contemporary colonial climate, even as broad-based efforts to decolonize and to disentangle the deeply-rooted nature of social hierarchy and elite class understandings that pervade much of Peruvian culture are waged elsewhere. As the so-called ‘sophisticated’ skyscrapers in districts across Lima are constructed every day, elegantly entrenching and reproducing colonial relations of power through employment practices inside the home, this misguided quest for modernity remains embedded in inequality. References Blofield, Merike. Care Work and Class: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights in Latin America. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012. Chauvin, Lucien. ‘10 Things to Do in Lima’. Time Magazine. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/travel/cityguide/ article/0,31489,1977548_1977464_1977441,00.html.

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Conferencia sobre el Convenio 189 del OIT. Lima, Peru, December 13, 2012. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1977. Espósito, Marcelo. ‘In 2006, the Peruvian artist Daniela Ortiz de Zevallos approached the wealthy branch of her family for help in order to be able to move to Europe’. Essay available at: http://marceloexposito.net/pdf/exposito_ danielaortiz_en.pdf. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. ‘From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuity in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor’. Signs, vol. 18, no.1, 1992, pp.1-43. Maich, Katherine. ‘Marginalized Struggles for Legal Reform: Cross-Country Consequences of Domestic Worker Organizing’. Social Development, Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America. Special issue of Social Development Issues (forthcoming). Museo Larco. ‘Culturas y Mapas de Tiempo’. Available at: http://www. museolarco.org/coleccion/culturas-y-mapas-del-tiempo/. Naples, Nancy. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. London: Routledge, 2003. Orlove, Benjamin S. ‘Putting Race in Its Place: Order in Colonial and Postcolonial Peruvian Geography’. Social Research, vol. 60, no. 2, 1993. Ortiz, Daniela. Habitaciones de Servicio. 2012. See: http://habitacionesdeservicio.com, http://daniela-ortiz.com/index. php?/projects/maids-rooms/. ‘Casa Rycroft’. See: http:// habitacionesdeservicio.com/casa-rycroft/, and “Casa la Isla,” http://habitacionesdeservicio.com/casa-la-isla/. Paseos Amazonicas. ‘Amazon Jungle paseosamazonicos.com/amazon_tours.htm.

Tours’.

See:

http://www.

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Socolow, Susan Migden. The Women of Colonial Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

katherine maich

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editing & organization coordination

Victor Guimarães Rachel Ellis, Dora Amorim and Camille Reis

copy-editing

Barbara Murray and Lauren M. Fleites

design

Guilherme Luigi, João Vitor Menezes and Mayara Bione

illustration

Clara Moreira

translation

Anthony Doyle (Port. – Eng.) and Simon Armand Berjeaut (French – Port.)

special thanks

Vanessa Barbosa, Amanda Guimarães, Deepa Naik and Luiz Amorim

supporting partners

Vitruvius Myrdle Court Press and Federal University of Pernambuco

Desvia Produções (Production Company & Editors) Rua da Aurora, 325 Sala 1011, cxpst 22 Postcode: 50050-000 Recife – PE – Brazil Phone: +55 81 3222 7053 Email: contato@desvia.com.br ISBN: 978-85-69221-01-2 1st edition – 2015 www.desvia.com.br /domesticaofilme printed and bound by provisual ltda., recife, brazil

funding

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support

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