Gender Violence and intersectional inequalities in the course of care work in Brazil

The article deals with the central criticism of feminist research which lies in the unfair distribution of care work within society and indicates the emergence of intersectional inequalities of care and reproductive work and its feminization as well as ethnifization. The Coronavirus pandemic exposed the serious consequences of the „structural carelessness of capitalism“ (Aulenbacher 2018). The unequal distribution of care work and the shift in responsibility towards feminized and ethnizided people can be understood as form and consequence of structural gender violence. In this way, it creates and entrenches injury structures and openness to injury, which primarily disadvantage and discriminate against women and people who are already vulnerable and contributes to making their lives precarious. In Brazil, which is characterized by strong inequalities, women, mothers and care workers in particular were among the first to be affected by poverty during the health and economic crises during the pandemic: This is evidenced by a rise in unemployment among women of 17.9% and an increase in the number of girls leaving the education system. The background to this is the ongoing privatization of care and welfare work for decades, exacerbating the inequalities in Brazil at the intersection of gender, „race“ and class and bringing the „care factory“ private household to its limits. In this way, the structural weaknesses in the care and welfare sector underwent were exacerbated during the pandemic, which manifests itself primarily in feminized unemployment, an outbreak of famine among poorer people and an extreme increase in violence and, in particular, violence against women. Against this background, the ultra-neoliberal and right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro has been a key player in the institutionalization of violent relationships since 2018 and consolidates the gendered distribution of care work to the disadvantage of women through an austerity policy that further exacerbates social inequality and poverty for women. Part of this new state policy are attacks on gender and women`s rights and an open anti-gender ideology, which is firstly propogated through media discourses on social media and secondly implemented politically through ministries and legislation. This discursive context also reproduces and reinforces the feminization and racialization of care work by disempowering women and updating and legitimizing existing hierarchies and reinforcing the already existing structural racism. The article aims to answer to what extent structural gender violence is solidified in Brazil by shifting care and reproductive work into increasingly familiarizing and individualizing responsibility within private households. The empirical part of the study is based on around 20 interviews with Care-Workers, who do unpaid or paid care work in private households in Sao Paulo. With an theoretical intersectional feminist approach, which defines the state as a „social relationship“ (Poulantzas 1978) it should be shown the interaction between state politics and subjective live experiences of the affected people who do care work in Brazilian society.