“Cleaning the world” in times of COVID 19:

domestic workers between social reproduction and expropriation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to think about paid domestic work in Brazil in the midst of the pandemic crisis associated with the new coronavirus, in light of theoretical perspectives that reposition, on new epistemic bases, the intersections of class, gender and race oppressions as structural elements of the capitalist system. Statistical data show the impact of Covid-19 and the subsequent economic crisis in deepening the devaluation, precariousness, and impoverishment of domestic workers, mostly black women with poor schooling and limited access to social policies. The pandemic, in its serious consequences, made latent racial and gender hierarchies tributaries of the experience of coloniality and slavery, prolonged and maintained in permanent reinvention in the Brazilian context. Finally, the article draws on Nancy Fraser’s innovative theoretical proposition about the category “expropriation”, proposing that it could be applied in combination with the notion of “social reproduction”, as conceived by Marxist feminism four decades ago to situate paid domestic work at the convergence of these two “conditions of possibility” of contemporary capitalism.