1. Chapter 2: The Aesthetics of Domination, Class, Culture, and the Lives of Domestic Workers
1.1. Afro-Brazilian women are the lowest pay within the highly unequal Brazilian Economy.
1.1.1. Extremely difficult to secure decent working class jobs with adequate pay, this is due to:
1.1.1.1. Observable racial characterisitcs
1.1.1.1.1. boa aparencia, which "good appearance"
1.1.1.2. Observable class characteristics
1.2. Domestic Work
1.2.1. Worked 14-15 hours
1.2.1.1. Leave employers home at 6 or 7 pm.
1.2.2. 1-2 hours traveling to and from work each day
1.2.3. Often changing buses 2-3 times, and standing for hours at a time on the crowded busses.
1.2.3.1. Transportation time and costs ate into her earnings
1.2.3.1.1. 1992: $6 per day - $1 for transportation = $5 per day
1.2.4. Faxineira - heavy duty day cleaner
1.2.4.1. Gloria would travel each day of the week to a different employers home and to do the heavy duty cleaning, laundry, and a large amount of cooking
1.2.4.2. Nobody would sign her carteira de trabalho (work card) since she lived at home and went to work rather then being a live in worker for a family.
1.2.4.3. Offered advantages, as payment was made on a daily basis by each employer, which was beneficial for Gloria's tight economic situation and her 14 children. If she missed a day, due to an emergency she could perform 2 days of work in one day to make up for it.
1.2.4.3.1. Although there are disadvantages as well, if employers could not afford full-time service, Gloria would arrive to their home with 2-3 days worth of complete chaos for her to take care of
1.2.5. Employer and domestic worker relationships
1.2.5.1. amicable, and gloria was quite fond of her employers
1.2.5.1.1. Therefore in difficult times, glorias employers were often helpful and flexible due to their arrangement.
1.2.5.2. Dona Beth
1.2.5.2.1. Wanted to hire Gloria full time, and was willing to pay a living wage of 5 salaries per month, which is extraordinarily rare and generous.
1.2.5.2.2. Also paid Gloria for the transportation costs she incurred.
1.2.5.2.3. Individual roles under stood, but not in a typical sense.
1.3. Lowest paid sector
1.3.1. There is not enough expansion of the of the formal sector to absorb the increasing number of workers in the lowest sectors
1.3.2. Similar to the US, the minimum salary is not a living wage but a subsistence wage
1.3.2.1. The market rate for all domestic workers is disportionately low compared with what is needed for a workers proper sustenance.
1.3.3. Domestic work is the lowest paid, and affordable to even the lowest ranks of the middle class
1.3.3.1. Employing a domestic worker is perceived as a necessity as well as a class marker, and a form of identity.
1.3.3.2. Middle class obsessed with a fear of slipping into the population that must supply manual labor
1.3.3.3. Employing a domestic worker is a defining feature of middle class
1.3.3.3.1. Middle-classness is a historical identity construction in process and more than a mere economic enumeration.
1.3.3.3.2. These relations serve to create and sustain among the poor a vision of themselves as inferior.
1.4. Rio
1.4.1. Economy in decline
1.4.1.1. City of extremes
1.4.1.1.1. Feminization of the workforce
1.4.1.1.2. Growing participation of children in the economy.
1.4.1.2. Increased migration to the city.
1.4.2. lost the struggle against San Paulo for commercial and industrial dominance.
1.4.3. Colonial Rio
1.4.3.1. Slaves, ex-slaves, and domestic workerd.
1.5. Class, Culture and the Effects of Domination
1.5.1. the domestic worker and employer relationship is a rare place where relations of intimacy takes place despite the class gap that characterizes Brazil's social apartheid.
1.5.1.1. Division of class and everyday culture
1.5.1.2. Relations between domestic workers and their employers are helpful in exploring how cultural practices are produced and reproduced, and what effects are created through this form of domination
1.5.1.2.1. Racial dimension is present
1.5.1.2.2. Elite class desire to be modern presented challenges
1.5.2. Slaves for princesses
1.5.2.1. Not given the same food that the employers ate.
2. Chapter 3: Color-blind Erotic Democracies, Black Consciousness Politics, and the Black Cinderellas of Felicidade Eterna
2.1. Color, is an indicator of a class relationship.
2.2. Race and Class in Brazil and the US
2.2.1. North americas debate about race-based affirmative action but rarely debate about possibility of class-based affirmative action
2.2.2. Lack of Brazilian race-based civil rights movement provides a contrast to the events in the US, where racism was codified and challenged, both in a widely social movement and within the legal system.
2.2.3. Blackness-dark skin color and African racial feature continue to be associated with slavery and are considered to be ugly.
2.2.3.1. Despite the economic legacy of slavery, poverty in Brazil is conceptualized as a class problem rather than a race problem
2.2.3.2. Race is embodies in everyday valuations of sexual attractiveness and this attractiveness is gendered radicalized and class-oriented in ways that commodify black females and white male economic, racial and class privilege.
2.2.3.3. Shame attached to blackness, which is why it is rarely talked about
2.3. Black Cinderella
2.3.1. Polarization of racial categories
2.3.2. Sexual unions across the color line provide proof of Brazil's racial democracy, but also gets in the way of perspectives that seek to lay bare the patterned forms of inequality embedded in or enacted through certain forms or racialized eroticism.
2.3.3. Fantasy, dependent on a coroa who is willing to be seduced and it is recognized as a realistic and legitimate, albeit rare, form of social mobility, it confuses the race issue because it is considered a fairy tale.
2.3.3.1. Seducing a economically more stable man, and both female and male protagonists experience social mobility as a result.
2.3.3.1.1. A method of escaping from poverty, however, marrying or seducing a coroa is based on gendered and racialized values of attractiveness in an erotic market.
2.3.4. Mulata - Seductive mixed raced woman.
2.3.4.1. Women have claimed the role of the mulata as their own, partly as a response to increasing economic immiseration but also as a way of resisting the widespread notion that equates blackness with ugliness. Being a successful seducer enables them to negate this oppressive equation.
2.3.4.2. Beautiful and dangerous
2.3.4.3. Product of national ideology about both race and sexuality
2.3.4.3.1. Exalted as a positive reading of national identity, not criticized.
2.3.4.3.2. Viewed as a positive image of the citizen and embodiment of mixed race creativity beauty and sensuality, and embodiment of carnival.
2.3.4.4. Female slaves sexuality was not in the service of procreation or the ideological reproduction of the family, free from the ties of any order, religious or moral, a sexual object
2.3.4.4.1. Served as ideological justification for sexual attacks on slaves
2.3.4.5. Forever exalted as an erotic Other.
2.3.4.5.1. Bodies were objects of display
2.3.5. 4 American Stereotypes ofd Black women that pathologize black women by linking them to specific forms of sexuality
2.3.5.1. The Mammy
2.3.5.2. The Matriarch
2.3.5.3. The Welfare Mother
2.3.5.4. The Jezebel
2.3.5.4.1. Provided as rationale for sexual assaults by white men
2.4. Brazilian Sexuality: History, Representation and Scholarship
2.4.1. Women offer themselves to the whites
2.4.1.1. Defense of racial democracy
2.4.2. Whitening Ideal
2.4.2.1. Gradual racial purification process that would whiten the population
2.4.2.1.1. Glorified whiteness and homegeneity
2.4.3. Brazil a color-blind erotic democracy.
2.4.3.1. low Other
2.4.4. Difficult to talk about due to ambiguities involved in the sexualization of racialized bodies.
2.4.4.1. Issues silences by "sex is good"
2.4.4.1.1. Form of cultural censorship
2.5. Hierarchies of Beauty and Social Mobility
2.5.1. Categories defining beauty and ugliness turn sexual attractiveness into a racial matter
2.5.1.1. Degree of whiteness and blackness are recognized as an accepted scale of beauty.
2.5.2. Women of color are enslaved by feelings of inferiority and their aspirations of being admitted into the white world
2.5.2.1. Women are more reluctant to interpret others behavior as racist than are men because they tend to encounter racism in intimate contexts that are charged with ambivalent emotions
2.5.2.1.1. Black female sexuality is valorized and considered erotic because it is suspended in a web of power relations
2.5.3. Women believe that because coroa desires his domestic servant and THEREFORE is not racist
2.5.3.1. Gendered, radicalized and sexualized popular vision of social mobility
2.5.3.1.1. But also story of mistress-hood and potential abuse
2.5.3.2. Interracial physical contact, including sexuality as proof of non racist attitude.
2.5.4. Racial hegemony prevents mobilization in Brazil