Social Suffering and the Construction of Autonomy within Brazil’s Social Organization of Care: Forms of Resistance among Domestic Workers in São Paulo’s Favelas

This proposal investigates how the social suffering experienced by domestic workers structures the passage from resistance to autonomy and informs struggles for recognition within the social organization of care in Brazil. It asks under what conditions experiences of subjection are — or are not — perceived as unjust, and when they catalyze repertoires of resistance that do (or do not) translate into autonomy, thereby shaping engagement in struggles for recognition in light of the dynamics of care. The analytical axis is care — both as labor and, above all, as an ethical-political category that organizes temporalities, spaces, relations, and responsibilities. Employing the reconstructive method of Critical Theory, the study articulates empirical research and theory to update the linkages among experiences of injustice, intersectionality, social suffering, agency/resistance, autonomy, and struggles for recognition, while considering the effects of second-order pathologies (blockages of reflexive/participatory capacities) on these interrelations and the structuring role of care. The research triangulates in-depth interviews with domestic workers, multi-sited ethnography in spaces of sociability — across two peripheral territories of São Paulo: Favela 1010 and Jardim São Remo — together with specialized literature; it examines discourses and social practices, focusing on circuits of care as a privileged site for understanding when and how repertoires of resistance do or do not convert into autonomy, and linking these processes to the social organization of care. The temporal scope spans the period following Brazil’s Domestic Workers’ Constitutional Amendment (PEC das Domésticas, 2013) and the conjuncture ushered in by the Covid-19 pandemic, which intensified and made visible pre-existing crises.