Weaponizing the Master’s Tools? Sex Scams, Dubious Consent, and Newspaper Coverage of Black Domestic Workers in Post-War Brazil

• In Event: Mid-20th Century Black Resistance Struggles - Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, pt. 1

Description for Program

Between 1940 and 1960, domestic workers became the subject of a new kind of coverage in Brazilian newspapers. Newspapers not only began to proclaim a “domestic work problem.” Mid-century maids were subversives: they refused to live in-house, demanded vacation time, and advocated for higher wages and less work. Journalists spent much of their coverage on the “fake maid,” a criminal who moonlighted as a domestic worker but sought to scam families and steal jewels and innocence. This presentation highlights one type of crime the “fake maid” committed, a sex scam referred to as the “conto do suadouro.” While women of all racial backgrounds orchestrated the scam, newspapers frequently focused on Black women. My lecture proposes the coverage of the “conto do suadouro” as a site of labor struggle between Black domestics and their employers. Simultaneously, this presentation grapples with Black women’s use of dubious consent against the men they scammed. Was sexual assault, typically weaponized against domestic workers in the home of their employers, in the “conto do suadouro” mere inversion of the master’s tools or something more complicated?

Author

• Cassie Osei, Bucknell University