Embodying global gender norms: A decolonial and diasporic reading of domestic workers' activism in Brazil

Abstract

The article offers a decolonial and diasporic reading of global gender norms as sites of power where nested hierarchies – of gender, race, class, among others – are constantly being contested, refused, and negotiated by and within bodies that resist. It departs from a Latin American/Ladin Amefrican perspective, which assumes an alternative genealogy of human rights that begins with the embodied experience and struggles of people, instead of assuming the existence of an international normative framework. It looks particularly at the struggle of domestic workers for labor rights in Brazil as a case of embodied human rights activism. By evidencing their agency in the formulation of global and local norms, the article claims that domestic workers' struggles were central not only for negotiating, disrupting and (re)creating spaces of power and agenda-setting, but also for confronting the structures of coloniality that sustain the modern matrix of power.