Intimate labor and affective encounters. A gendered perspective on the Brazilian migration in Germany

• In Event: Brazilian emigration: what we know and what is new about it -2

Abstract

This paper looks closely on bodily and affective dimensions in intimate labor contexts of Brazilian migrants in Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine encounters between Brazilian women working in different care arrangements (as beauticians, as domestic workers, as nurses), and their German clients, bosses and patients. Focussing on the temporary and positioned relatedness between attending and attended person, I inquire signifying practices and spaces of agency within highly hierarchized and often stigmatized service work settings by situating them in the context of intersecting gendered, racialized and class regimes of belonging and representation. Thereby, I include a debate on socio-cultural notions of care and corporeality, of professionalism and hygiene, in order to understand the manifold layers of boundary work in Germany’s most feminized and ethnicized labor sectors. This discussion will be embedded in a more general picture of the Brazilian migration in Germany.

Author

• Maria Lidola