The Affects of Conviviality-Inequality in Female Domestic Labour

The present paper discusses conviviality in the ambivalent power relations of paid female domestic labour, by tracing the ways in which affects articulate social and employment status. As several feminist scholars in Brazil have shown (Kofes 2001, Brites 2007, Biroli 2018), feelings in the domestic working sphere are oriented toward the family and friendship. In my reading, these studies foreground that expressing such affection facilitates the inclusion of a “strange” woman in the household, enables domestic workers to ask for support in difficult moments, but at the same time creates an emotional surrounding in which both hierarchy and inequality are felt more intensely. In accentuating these ambivalent power relations on the level of daily interactions, I foreground an analytical lens informed by queer, feminist and affect studies towards difference that strives to integrate symbolic, structural and subjective aspects of social inequality. […]