BETWEEN TIME AND RIGHTS

NARRATIVES OF DOMESTIC WORKES IN THE DURATION OF LIFE

Abstract

 This article analyzes the trajectories of two domestic workers through an audiovisual narrative, examining how gender, care, informality, and formalization are articulated in the production of meaning over biographical duration. The study takes the workers’ own narratives as an epistemological field, enabling an understanding of the social and subjective effects of legal transformations. Grounded in the perspective of the ethnography of duration and feminist debates on the sexual division of labor, it explores how the “Brazil’s Domestic Workers’ Constitutional Amendment” is inscribed as a political event in memory, reconfiguring life projects and experiences of citizenship without dissolving the coexistence of formal and informal labor regimes. Methodologically, the research is based on in-depth audiovisual interviews. The findings indicate that domestic work structures trajectories marked by the overlap of care, family life, and labor insertion, while formalization emerges as a situated milestone embedded in unequal temporalities, revealing the limits of democratic recognition and the persistence of an unequally experienced citizenship.