Magister Artium - MA / This study questions why domestic work that is generally considered a feminine job is yet a field dominated by men in the city of Nampula, Mozambique. In the attempt to explain this phenomenon, the research explores economic, social and cultural aspects. Due to the fact that Nampula is a province with a strong Islamic presence and the majority of the population identify themselves as belonging to the Makhuwa ethnic group—which is traditionally defined by a matrilinear kinship system—I argue that the domestic sector remaines masculinised because of the influence of the matrilinear values and gendered practices. I also argue that the Islamic patriarchal values play a decisive role as men see themselves as the exclusive family providers and for that reason forbid their wives to develop and to get engaged in economic activities outside the household. This study also explores notions of masculinity in connection with domestic work and examines how male domestic workers, coming from rural areas and employed in the city, perceive and perform their masculine identities. How does the job of the domestic worker shape particular understandings of masculinity? Given the fact that many domestic workers in Nampula are immigrant people from the rural areas of the Zambézia province, I argue that migrating and working in the city is considered as a way to achieve a manhood as immigrants have access to goods that can only be purchased in urban contexts and are scarce in the villages. The access to all these “modern” commodities and the experience of the city make the immigrant young boys to gain respect in their original communities.

This thesis has two distinct yet interrelated parts. In the first instance, it investigates child domestic work in Iringa ? a small town in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Second, it examines the participatory action research methodology that was adopted as part of that investigation. Data were collected by a team of researchers that included children and young people who had themselves been domestic workers. A questionnaire, interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with local leaders, employers of child domestic workers and (both current and former) child domestic workers themselves. An agenda for change - that aimed towards the redistribution of power within domestic working arrangements - was developed on the basis of those data and presented to local government authorities in Iringa. This research makes a number of contributions to understandings of both child domestic work and participatory action research methodologies. First, the thesis contends that child domestic work is a complex activity which (despite its frequently exploitative and abusive character) should not be identified as a purely harmful force in the lives of young employees. The multiplicity of ways in which that occupation is experienced can only be uncovered through the incorporation of a range of stakeholders? perspectives. Second, this research found that notions of ?family? were discursively linked to child domestic working arrangements in Iringa. This has inhibited recognition of child domestic work as ?real work?, and contributed to the exploitation of these young employees. This thesis contends that increased formalisation and regulation of child domestic work would offer an opportunity to reconstruct child domestic workers as ?employees? and thereby improve their circumstances. This research has also challenged prevalent notions of children?s incompetence and shown that young people with minimal formal education can (and should) participate as co-researchers in academic endeavours investigating their lives. However, it has also found that young people?s competencies and interests vary, and that notions of appropriate participatory processes have often failed to take such diversity into account. This thesis contends that more participatory forms of evaluation may allow greater flexibility (and relevance) to be fostered when assessing the ?success? of participatory processes. Academics need to be alert to the alienating effects that (unwittingly) ?judgemental? and (unrealistically) ?perfect? accounts of participatory and action-oriented research processes can have on young scholars.

This thesis has two distinct yet interrelated parts. In the first instance, it investigates child domestic work in Iringa ? a small town in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Second, it examines the participatory action research methodology that was adopted as part of that investigation. Data were collected by a team of researchers that included children and young people who had themselves been domestic workers. A questionnaire, interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with local leaders, employers of child domestic workers and (both current and former) child domestic workers themselves. An agenda for change - that aimed towards the redistribution of power within domestic working arrangements - was developed on the basis of those data and presented to local government authorities in Iringa. This research makes a number of contributions to understandings of both child domestic work and participatory action research methodologies. First, the thesis contends that child domestic work is a complex activity which (despite its frequently exploitative and abusive character) should not be identified as a purely harmful force in the lives of young employees. The multiplicity of ways in which that occupation is experienced can only be uncovered through the incorporation of a range of stakeholders? perspectives. Second, this research found that notions of ?family? were discursively linked to child domestic working arrangements in Iringa. This has inhibited recognition of child domestic work as ?real work?, and contributed to the exploitation of these young employees. This thesis contends that increased formalisation and regulation of child domestic work would offer an opportunity to reconstruct child domestic workers as ?employees? and thereby improve their circumstances. This research has also challenged prevalent notions of children?s incompetence and shown that young people with minimal formal education can (and should) participate as co-researchers in academic endeavours investigating their lives. However, it has also found that young people?s competencies and interests vary, and that notions of appropriate participatory processes have often failed to take such diversity into account. This thesis contends that more participatory forms of evaluation may allow greater flexibility (and relevance) to be fostered when assessing the ?success? of participatory processes. Academics need to be alert to the alienating effects that (unwittingly) ?judgemental? and (unrealistically) ?perfect? accounts of participatory and action-oriented research processes can have on young scholars.

Magister Artium - MA / This study questions why domestic work that is generally considered a feminine job is yet a field dominated by men in the city of Nampula, Mozambique. In the attempt to explain this phenomenon, the research explores economic, social and cultural aspects. Due to the fact that Nampula is a province with a strong Islamic presence and the majority of the population identify themselves as belonging to the Makhuwa ethnic group—which is traditionally defined by a matrilinear kinship system—I argue that the domestic sector remaines masculinised because of the influence of the matrilinear values and gendered practices. I also argue that the Islamic patriarchal values play a decisive role as men see themselves as the exclusive family providers and for that reason forbid their wives to develop and to get engaged in economic activities outside the household. This study also explores notions of masculinity in connection with domestic work and examines how male domestic workers, coming from rural areas and employed in the city, perceive and perform their masculine identities. How does the job of the domestic worker shape particular understandings of masculinity? Given the fact that many domestic workers in Nampula are immigrant people from the rural areas of the Zambézia province, I argue that migrating and working in the city is considered as a way to achieve a manhood as immigrants have access to goods that can only be purchased in urban contexts and are scarce in the villages. The access to all these “modern” commodities and the experience of the city make the immigrant young boys to gain respect in their original communities.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:33:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2009-12-01Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:26:19Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 carvalhal_tb_dr_prud.pdf: 3117860 bytes, checksum: 75504abb4668d95afe27653623e66a0c (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Neste estudo, apontamos algumas contradições referentes à dinâmica territorial do trabalho domiciliar como repercussão da informalização, enquanto produto das mudanças que se processam no âmbito mais geral do trabalho. Os rearranjos do capital, nesse caso, a desconcentração do processo produtivo e a expansão das pequenas e médias unidades têm se juntado às formas flexibilizadas e precarizadas de trabalho e tem feito avançar a horizontalização do capital em Terra Roxa. Assim o trabalho produtivo em domicílio se mistura ao trabalho reprodutivo doméstico, entronizando uma forma específica de exploração de elevados contigentes de força de trabalho, especialmente de mulheres. / In this study we present some contradictions relating to the territorial dynamics of the work at home as publicity about the informality, while a product of the changes that are conducted in the more general context of the work. The rearrangements of the capital, in this case the devolution process, and expansion of small and medium units, has been joined to the forms flexible and precarious of work and has made progress on “horizontalização” of capital in Terra Roxa. This way the productive work at home mixes to the reproductive domestic work, featuring a specific form of exploitation of high quotas of the workforce, especially of women.

Orientador: Antonio Thomaz Junior / Banca: Aparecida Darc de Souza / Banca: Luis Antonio Barone / Banca: María Franco García / Banca: Everaldo Santos Melazzo / Resumo: Neste estudo, apontamos algumas contradições referentes à dinâmica territorial do trabalho domiciliar como repercussão da informalização, enquanto produto das mudanças que se processam no âmbito mais geral do trabalho. Os rearranjos do capital, nesse caso, a desconcentração do processo produtivo e a expansão das pequenas e médias unidades têm se juntado às formas flexibilizadas e precarizadas de trabalho e tem feito avançar a horizontalização do capital em Terra Roxa. Assim o trabalho produtivo em domicílio se mistura ao trabalho reprodutivo doméstico, entronizando uma forma específica de exploração de elevados contigentes de força de trabalho, especialmente de mulheres. / Abstract: In this study we present some contradictions relating to the territorial dynamics of the work at home as publicity about the informality, while a product of the changes that are conducted in the more general context of the work. The rearrangements of the capital, in this case the devolution process, and expansion of small and medium units, has been joined to the forms flexible and precarious of work and has made progress on "horizontalização" of capital in Terra Roxa. This way the productive work at home mixes to the reproductive domestic work, featuring a specific form of exploitation of high quotas of the workforce, especially of women. / Doutor

Sweden is the most gender-equal country in Europe, but nevertheless, there are still flaws in  certain areas, especially within the walls of the household when it comes to chores and financial responsibility. This examination is a qualitative, semi-structured interview study. The selection of respondents in this study are six heterosexual couples in the age of 20-30 and 40-60 years old, who lives together. My theoretical points of departure are Bourdieus’s theory of habitus, as well as his theory of cultural capital, which I have chosen to call resources in this study, along with a concept of generation which defines by a number of other renown scientists in the area. The study came to show that the couples which partook, tries hard to weigh out for the injustices in their relationship connected to, for example, their habitus and resources. In this study, I refer to this as compensations. These compensations are sorted into three themes: education and income, the lack of a parent, together with age and time. The result showed that the couples divided their home finances as equal as possible, that the women had a lower income than the men if they didn’t have an education, and that the people who had grown up with a single parent had from a young age had to help out a lot with chores at home. It also showed that the older couples did not wanted to follow in their own parents footsteps, but instead they wanted to create a more equal relationship by helping each other more. The younger couples had the same point of view.   The conclusions I drew from this are that the women needed a higher education in order to make as much money as their male partner, but also in order to have the possibility of making even more. It also emerged that the respondents compensated a little extra if they themselves had experienced the lack of a parent, since they had learned the value of helping each other and not letting one person draw the heavy load all by oneself.   At last but not least, the study showed that the aspect of generation had some influence since the couples broke the old conventions in one way or the other, in terms of the norms of the male versus the female role in the household.

Thesis advisor: Marilynn S. Johnson / This dissertation explores the labor and collective organization of domestic workers in metropolitan Boston to uncover the new labor activism of the last half century. In 2014, Massachusetts became the fourth state in the U.S. to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. The law, the nation’s most comprehensive at the time, signaled a remarkable triumph for household employees whose collective activism anchored in Boston over four years achieved basic labor protections for tens of thousands. While the tale of this recent success has been captured by journalists and a handful of scholars, my study uncovers a multi-generational history of domestic workers’ fight for dignity and economic justice. I locate the origins of the 2014 victory in the grassroots organizing of pioneering Black, Caribbean, and Latinx women decades earlier. Local domestic workers and their allies sustained three separate waves of collective action during a half century marked by growing economic inequality, a decline in trade unionism, and mounting xenophobia. As I demonstrate, they developed a savvy repertoire of strategies that transformed household employment from a seemingly private, hidden affair into a societal concern requiring government intervention. Ultimately, my dissertation explains the emergence of a powerful and unexpected form of labor organizing--the new labor activism--that is community-based, multi-issue oriented, and propelled by working-class women of color. In directing critical attention to the relatively obscure history of domestic worker organizing, my study joins scholarship that expands analysis beyond the realm of the white male industrial worker to reconsider what constituted work, who comprised organized labor, and how we characterize recent labor history. By examining this particular workers’ movement, I present new insights into the groundswell of labor mobilization that erupted in American cities during the later twentieth century. Historians have accurately cast the period as one of organized labor’s weakness, dormancy, and decline. Even so, by prioritizing community-based campaigns anchored by immigrant and non-white women employed as domestic workers, I demonstrate that they also made it a time of hope and agitation, of rebirth and revival rather than repose. With appreciation for complexity, I gauge their activism not merely in terms of wins and losses, but also in regard to workers’ evolving sense of empowerment alongside their ability to spark larger public policy conversations concerning labor standards, the care economy, and the role of government. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

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By taking the experiences and narratives of Indonesian women in Malaysia as the empirical material, this dissertation offers an analysis on spatialised power practices in the context of paid domestic workers. Family survival prompts these women to work abroad, but patriarchal norms shift their economic contribution as supplementary to the men’s role as the breadwinner. The interviews reveal that these women chose Malaysia as their destination country after having listened to oral stories, but despite the transnational mobility involved in their decisions, they are rendered immobile in the employers’ house. Furthermore, the analysis shows an intricate ensemble of power relations in which gender, class and nationality/ethnicity interact with each other, inform and reproduce spatialised domination and labour exploitation practices by the employers. Immigration status of the workers, meanwhile, puts them in a subordinated position in relation to the employers, citizens of the host country. Without the recognition from the state on this particular form of embodied labour, the employers are responsible for defining the working conditions of the workers, leading to precarious conditions. Findings on several resistance practices by the workers complete the analysis of power practices, where resistance is treated as an entangled part of power. Contributing to the study of gendered geographies of exploitation, the study identifies the home and the body as the main levels of analysis; meanwhile, practices at the national level by the state, media and recruitment/placement agencies and globalisation processes are identified as interrelated factors that legitimate the employers’ practices of exploitation. Finally, the dissertation contributes to feminist geography analysis on gender, space, and power through South-South migration empirics.