"An attachment that hurts": reflections on care work and discourses on love (Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region, Brazil)

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate how the discourse about the moral feeling "love" aggravates the precariousness of care work. For that, it used analysis built in two field works, one observing hearings on paid domestic work in Varas do Trabalho and another performing a participant observation in a Community Center for the elderly. Both were held in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro. It should also be noted that this article dialogues with gender studies, in order to demonstrate how the speeches about friendship and charity have generated justifications for extracting a large amount of unpaid or poorly paid work from women. In this sense, informality and precariousness must be considered in conjunction with discourses on emotions. Finally, the article analyzes how familiarity and gender affect this relationship of paid domestic work.