Abstract

Brazil is the country with the largest number of domestic workers in the world. It’s clear that the positions occupied by a domestic worker in Brazilian society are surrounded by three main factors (gender, race and class) and this intersection creates a place of vulnerability and subalternity.
The cinema and movies produced by a country are a place for the images and representations which a society creates of itself. (Aumont 2012). Acknowledging the extreme vulnerability inflicted upon domestic workers, how Brazilian movies portrayed the domestic workers: creating and reinforcing stereotypes or breaking them? This is an important question, because the way a character or a series of characters are portrayed in movies reveals how a society perceives these groups.
This work’s methodology is inspired by the works of two researchers, Sonia Roncador (2008) e Mariana Souto (2016). For this communication, the intention is to craft an inventory of domestic workers images and representation in Brazilian movies. The selected body of work is composed of fictional feature-length films, released from 1958 to 2019, in which the domestic workers are the main or very prominent characters.
With these variety of movies, it is possible to establish comparisons, frictions and dialogues; there also patterns amongst movies from the same period or production cycles, as chanchadas, pornochanchadas or contemporary movies. The intention is to perceive relations between the movies and also categorize them based on the stereotypes they promote or how they break these stereotypes.