Mães que criam, mãos que servem: reflexões sobre maternidades negras e trabalho doméstico remunerado em Salvador (BA)

Abstract

In this study, I analyzed the impact of paid domestic work on the motherhood of black women who work in this profession. Based on black feminist epistemology, I interviewed five black women/domestic workers and traced their experiences as mothers, considering their trajectories as residents of Alto da Sereia, a fishing community, also identified as an Urban Quilombo, located in the city of Salvador (BA). To this end, I adopted an intersectional approach, analyzing how gender, race, class, generation, and territory influenced their motherhood and the place they occupied in the labor market. Using the comprehensive interview method, I mobilized the narratives of the interlocutors as a theoretical and empirical resource for scientific production. In this way, I highlighted how the motherhood of black women, still little investigated in the human and feminist sciences, is made invisible by the narratives that dominate these fields, which highlights how racism and sexism structure the production of knowledge, relegating some subjects to the margins. I therefore understand that the racialization of motherhood is particularly relevant in Brazil, where the legitimate representations of this role are based on a colonial and patriarchal model, far removed from the reality of most people. According to the interlocutors of this research, their experiences with motherhood were marked, above all, by the sharing of care, the centrality of women in the family organization, the expansion of this role beyond the biological mother and the extension of care across different generations. Thus, I found that there is a plurality of perceptions that emerge from a location and they tend to incorporate collective demands, making maternal practices adapt to the context in which they are inserted.