DOMESTIC WORK AND SLAVERY IN BRAZIL FROM A BIOPOLITICAL PERSPECTIVE:

a continuum of violence and exploitation of female bodies

Abstract

The article aims to present the categories of biopolitics, the state of exception and the paradigm of the field, based on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, as a theoretical backgroud to contextualize the violence perpetrated against women, mostly poor and black in Brazil in their spaces. during the Covid-19 pandemic. It seeks to answer the following research problem: to what extent, from a biopolitical perspective, is it possible to establish a historical continuum between slavery and domestic work in Brazil, marked by violence and the exploitation of female bodies in work spaces? The research is viewed through the technique of bibliographic research and the Foucauldian genealogical method, addressing contemporary issues without losing sight of facts from the country's historical past. The text is structured in two parts: initially, it discusses the historical violence perpetrated against poor and black women linked to domestic work from Colonial Brazil to the present day; next, it analyzes how the house, especially in pandemic times, can become a kind of field, by transforming itself into a space of exception that allows the perpetuation of the most abject forms of slavery, which place women at the center of the techniques of politicization and exploitation of life.