Domestic workers and strategies of resistance to violence in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The issue of violence in informal workplaces remains largely understudied. Furthermore, although domestic labor and domestic laborers have been the focus of increased academic attention over the past few years, there is a scarcity of systematic research tackling the multifaceted strategies utilized by these workers to resist workplace violence. In order to address this shortcoming, our panel is comprised of four papers, which propose to analyze various aspects of domestic workers’ everyday forms of resistance to informal workplace violence. Although borrowing conceptual cues from Scott’s (1985-89) pioneering work, our theoretical framework seeks to go beyond Weapons of the Weak’s interpretation of resistance. Our papers therefore analyze habitual formal and informal strategies of resistance to violence, practiced individually or collectively, and implemented in quiet and symbolic as well as in overt and material fashions. The papers will examine strategies of dissimulation, negotiation or conflict, which seek to guarantee the survival and advance the economic and sociopolitical interests of the actor(s) adopting them. It will focus on issues of race, gender, spatial location, as well as political and socioeconomic inclusion as explanatory factors. Our panel also establishes the bases of a comparative analysis of the various ramification of this issue, by focusing on the often contrasting but frequently similar cases of Brazil and Peru. This panel also has the merit of incorporating the works of people at various stages of their academic career (two graduate students, one researcher, and one professor), all members of a research group investigating this topic.

Sub Track

• Violence and Insecurities

Session Organizer

• Jean François Mayer, Concordia University

Chair

• Maria Julia Rossi, CUNY, John Jay College

Discussant

• Katherine E Maich, The Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Conceptualizing Everyday Resistance to Informal Workplace Violence: an Examination of Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies - Jean François Mayer, Concordia University

• Domestic Workers and Symbolic Resistance in Brazil - Otacilio de Oliveira Junior, Independent Scholar

• Domestic Work in Lima: Violence, Luck and Exit - Anna C Calderón

• Hierarchies of the Household - Luisa R Seidl