Just sent off the absolute final draft of my master's thesis, complete with all the revisions that came up during the defense. There's an abstract in English, but the rest is in Portuguese.“Você vai me servir”: Desigualdade, proximidade e agência nos dois lados do equador
Thesis with high res images (9.8mb)
Thesis with low res images (1.9mb)
And here are more photos from the defense and related parties and travels.
3 comments:
Hi David,
I arrived here after watching your interesting video on Billboards ban in Sao Paulo. I'm finishing my PhD in USP as well, but live in London, and have had long (stressful) conversations with my English boyfriend about maids in Brazil.
So, I read your dissertation, good work! Very interesting and sensitive approach, I do hope you will get to publish something out of it.
Just one thing I'd like to get your views on: I understand that domestic work can become quite oppressive, due to abusive employers. Still, is it always, necessarily, oppressive? Don't you think it can be a legitimate profession, like a waiter, or a flight attendant? Sometimes you sound like you believe that in an ideal world there would be no domestic workers at all, is that right?
Anyway, good luck on everything and hope to hear back from you soon. Cheers, Isabel.
Hi Isabel!
Firstly, I am so glad to hear that you actually read and enjoyed my dissertation!
I do think that it is possible for domestic work to be a dignified and just form of paid employment, however I think that there are very few cases that I have ever seen of this. There are many different ethical/moral metrics that one could use to try to define when it is a "legitimate profession" (to use your language) or not in hypothetical situations. One basic one is that domestic workers in a just employment situation should have access to the same legal protections as any other worker. In the US, this is almost never the case, since the great majority of domestic workers are not citizens of the country where they work. This means that if their employers mistreat them, they simply have no legal recourse. Even if they were citizens in the US, however, they would not have the right to unionize or other rights afforded normal laborers (see page 150).
In Brazil, where domestic workers are citizens of the country where they work, the law still discriminates against them explicitly (also see page 150). In that country, I have often asked people who say that "the maid is just like part of the family" if they themselves would stand by and do nothing if their sister or daughter became a domestic worker, or if they would try to help that actual family member to gain educational skills or make the necessary connections to get a "better" job. This form of evaluating the "legitimacy" of the job is perhaps more interesting--under these circumstances, many Brazilians start to notice that their domestic workers are absolutely not part of the family; they go to different hospitals when they are sick, they will probably never have enough money saved up to retire, and they will almost certainly never have the money to pay for their children to have a higher education.
But I think that your question is really a more hypothetical one. You are right in your assertion that for me, in an ideal world there would be no domestic workers. Essentially, that is true. In a society such as the US or Brazil, or basically any other on this planet, I see it as both a personal tragedy that any individual be relegated to a lifetime of labor in domestic service and not be allowed to more fully explore their human capacities through access to a liberal education and a choice of careers. I also see it as an extreme social inefficiency in our societies, where we have clear shortages of people in so many other more important professions--teachers, nurses, doctors--but instead of training more people to do these more socially constructive jobs, our elected officials divert our national resources to war and destruction (in my country) and also simply fail to collect reasonable amounts of taxes from the richest of the rich (in yours).
The implication in what I write is also that nobody actually needs a domestic worker, and I also do think that this is quite true. If you have ever had a domestic worker (as I have at a few points in my life), and then you stop having one, you will see that your habits change and you actually can get accustomed to it quite easily. Whether or not you should fire your current domestic worker in order to be a more ethically "correct" person is a very different question though. As Meagher (see below) points out, there are two different questions at stake here, one is of what immediate personal action should be taken, and another of what long-term collective action we should participate in to change the system in which we live.
I strongly believe that we should all take action to create a world that offers something better than a lifetime of domestic service to the millions who currently work in this profession. Sadly, today, we actually offer much less to so many more millions living in dire working situations. My solution for those who do have domestic workers? Imagine what you would do if that person really were your family member. Help them to access other opportunities if they want them and work to help them to have a better future in the same way that you would for your family, friends or children. Pay them a wage that you yourself could imagine living on, and treat them the same way that you expect your own boss to treat you. At the same time, I think that it is extraordinarily important, whether or not one chooses to hire a domestic worker, to participate vigorously in our own troubled democracies to ensure that we are indeed working towards creating a world that offers more fulfilling opportunities to all of its residents. Once that happens, and people truly have the "choice" to go into domestic work or not (most do not have an option; see Chang below), then and only then do I truly believe that it might be a "legitimate profession", though of course we could discuss that term in much more detail.
What do you think?
Meagher, Gabrielle. Is it Wrong to Pay for Housework?: Hypatia, v. 17, n. 2, p. 52-66, 2002.
Chang, Grace. Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy. South End Press, 2000.
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