The places of black women in Brazil: The sexual division of labour in Lélia Gonzalez

In this article, we propose to investigate the sexual division of labour from the standpoint of black Latin American women. We start from the assumption that all knowledge reflects the particular perspectives of the knowing subject, making it possible to situate the social and political places of concepts and theories (HARDING, 2004). The experience of black women, especially Brazilian women, in making use of their "epistemic privilege" (GONZALEZ, 2020), i.e. from the point of view of the oppressed person, is an important source of critical insights (HARDING, 2004) into various dimensions of political economy. In this sense, our main question is: how do race, gender and class produce implications for the sexual division of labour of women situated in peripheral Brazilian capitalism? To reflect on this question, we will use the thinking of Lélia Gonzalez, a pioneering public intellectual in intersectionality studies in Brazil, using what Collins and Birge (2021) have called intersectional sensitivity. It is from this perspective that Gonzalez (2020) elaborated a thought in the mid-1980s on the sexual division of labour, through the idea of triple discrimination: race, gender and class, considering the late development of capitalism in Brazil, its racial and gender imbrications and the social, economic, political and cultural place that the black population occupied in this process. For Lélia Gonzalez, the sexual division of labour is correlated to the racial division of labour, i.e. a form of social organisation that denotes the centrality of race in the organisation of capital and in the distribution of social positions in the Brazilian social structure, and consequently relegates black women to domestic work or caring occupations. In this way, racial selection acts as a filter in the labour market that, through racist social imagery, aims to bar black people, and especially black women, from positions of power in the world of work. We hope that the article contributes to enriching the intersectional debate between race, class and gender and its centrality to understanding global politics, as well as contributing to the growing methodological debate for research in Political Economy.