Abstract
Minchillo examines two recent Brazilian feature films—Que horas ela volta?/The Second Mother (Anna Muylaert, 2015) and Casa Grande/The Ballad of Poor Jean (Fellipe Barbosa, 2014)—to discuss the role of female domestic workers within the dynamics of power in Brazilian society. By comparing cinematic representations of empregadas domésticas, the chapter interrogates whether they can negotiate their humanity in a place—the house of their employers—where they must be serviceable and yet invisible. In his study, Minchillo analyzes how directors Anna Muylaert and Fellipe Barbosa dialogue with the Brazilian long-lasting history of social asymmetries and the more recent attempts to promote social justice and the enfranchisement of the poor.
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Notes
- 1.
Suely Kofes, Mulher, Mulheres: Identidade, Diferença e Desigualdade na Relação entre Patroas e Empregadas Domésticas (Campinas: Unicamp, 2001), 139. Kofes rightly suggests that domestic work in Brazil suffers a double belittlement due to its association with both slavery and female domestic duties.
- 2.
Lucy Earle, Transgressive Citizenship and the Struggle for Social Justice: The Right to the City in São Paulo (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5.
- 3.
Ricardo Pinto, “Sobre o Abandono do Discurso Alegórico no Cinema Brasileiro Atual,” in Literatura e Sociedade: Narrativa, Poesia, Teatro e Canção Popular, ed. André Bueno (Rio de Janeiro : 7 Letras, 2006), 191; Ivana Bentes, “The Aesthetics of Violence in Brazilian Film,” in City of God in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action, ed. Else R. P. Vieira (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2005), 84–85.
- 4.
Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81.
- 5.
Tiago de Luca, “Casa Grande & Senzala: Domestic Space and Class Conflict in Casa Grande and Que Horas Ela Volta?” in Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, eds. Márcio da Silva and Mariana Cunha (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 203–19. Luca carries out an insightful analysis of both Barbosa and Muylaert’s use of deep focus.
- 6.
Marilena Chauí, Sobre a Violência (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017), Kindle edition, location 679.
- 7.
International Labor Organization (ILO), Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection, 2013, accessed January 20, 2018, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_173363.pdf
- 8.
Christiane Girard-Nunes and Pedro Henrique Isaac Silva, “Entre o Prescrito e o Real: O Papel da Subjetividade na Efetivação dos Direitos das Empregadas Domésticas no Brasil,” Sociedade e Estado 28, no. 3 (2013): 596, accessed March 29, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69922013000300007
- 9.
Dominique Vidal, “A Afetividade no Emprego Doméstico: Um Debate Francês à Luz de uma Pesquisa Realizada no Brasil,” in Novas Configurações do Trabalho e Economia Solidária, eds. Isabel Georges and Marcia de Paula Leite (São Paulo : Annablume, 2009), 185.
- 10.
Jurema Brites, “Serviço Doméstico: Elementos Políticos de um Campo Desprovido de Ilusões,” Campos: Revista de Antropologia Social 3 (2003): 74–75.
- 11.
Vidal, “A Afetividade no Emprego Doméstico,” 189.
- 12.
In the city of São Paulo the segregation of elevators based on race , gender, color, social status, age, or disability was not outlawed until 1996.
- 13.
Milton Santos, O Espaço do Cidadão (São Paulo: Nobel, 1998), 81.
- 14.
Kofes, Mulher, Mulheres, 35.
- 15.
Sônia Roncador, Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 9–11 and 94–101.
- 16.
Suely Kofes, “Entre Nós Mulheres, Elas as Patroas e Elas as Empregadas,” in Colcha de Retalhos: Estudos sobre a Famíllia no Brasil, eds. Antonio Augusto Arantes et al. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982), 192.
- 17.
As wittily formulated by Norma Alarcón, “in cultures in which ‘asymmetric race and class relations are a central organizing principle of society,’ one may also ‘become a woman’ in opposition to other women.” Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Foundations Books, 1990), 360.
- 18.
Judith Rollins , Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 210.
- 19.
Eduardo A. Vasconcellos, “The Making of the Middle-Class City: Transportation Policy in São Paulo ,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 29 (1997): 303.
- 20.
Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 258.
- 21.
Marcelo C. Neri, A Nova Classe Média: O Lado Brilhante da Base da Pirâmide (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2011), 43.
- 22.
Alfredo Saad-Filho and Armando Boito, “The Failure of the PT and the Rise of the ‘New Right,’” Socialist Register 52 (2016): 217; Timothy J. Power, “The Reduction of Poverty and Inequality in Brazil: Political Causes, Political Consequences,” New Order and Progress: Development and Democracy in Brazil, ed. Ben Ross Schneider (New York: Oxford UP, 2016), 213.
- 23.
Charles H. Klein, Sean T. Mitchell, and Benjamin Junge, “Naming Brazil’s Previously Poor: ‘New Middle Class’ as an Economic, Political, and Experiential Category,” Economic Anthropology 5, no. 1 (2018): 84.
- 24.
Matheus Pichonelli, “O Retrato Incompleto de ‘Que Horas Ela Volta?’” Carta Capital, Oct. 10, 2015.
- 25.
Anna Muylaert, interview by Laura Nicholson, IndieWire, August 27, 2015, www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-second-mother-director-anna-muylaert-on-why-it-took-20-years-to-make-her-award-winning-drama-202756/
- 26.
According to Arun Kumar, Muylaert , and her team “stage the nuances of cold class war without ever allowing a cacophony of argumentative voices to take over.” Arun Kumar, “Que horas ela volta? [2015]: A Nuanced & Acute Look at Class Differences,” High on Films, February 2, 2016, accessed July 16, 2018, www.highonfilms.com/second-mother-2015-nuanced-acute-look-class-differences/
- 27.
Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, Retrato das Desigualdades de Gênero e Raça, 2011, accessed July 3, 2018, http://www.ipea.gov.br/retrato/
- 28.
With 493,568 viewers, Que horas ela volta? earned about 6.8 million reais (1.8 million U.S. dollars) domestically and was the tenth most lucrative Brazilian film released in 2015. Produced in that same year, Casa grande took in around 524,000 reais (138,000 U.S. dollars) and was ranked twenty-third. Agência Nacional do Cinema (Ancine), “Listagem de Filmes Brasileiros e Estrangeiros Lançados 2009 a 2017,” accessed July 12, 2018, https://oca.ancine.gov.br/listagem-de-filmes-brasileiros-e-estrangeiros-lan%C3%A7ados-2009-2017
- 29.
Marcelo Ikeda, Cinema Brasileiro a partir da Retomada: Aspectos Econômicos e Políticos (São Paulo: Summus Editorial, 2015), 166.
- 30.
Donna Goldstein, Laughter out of place: Race, Class and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10.
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Cortez Minchillo, C. (2020). Partial Affection: The Place(s) of Female Domestic Workers in Recent Brazilian Cinema. In: Osborne, E., Ruiz-Alfaro, S. (eds) Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_8
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