Resumo:
In this study, I analyzed the impact of paid domestic work on the motherhood of black women
who work in this profession. Based on black feminist epistemology, I interviewed five black
women/domestic workers and traced their experiences as mothers, considering their
trajectories as residents of Alto da Sereia, a fishing community, also identified as an Urban
Quilombo, located in the city of Salvador (BA). To this end, I adopted an intersectional
approach, analyzing how gender, race, class, generation, and territory influenced their
motherhood and the place they occupied in the labor market. Using the comprehensive
interview method, I mobilized the narratives of the interlocutors as a theoretical and empirical
resource for scientific production. In this way, I highlighted how the motherhood of black
women, still little investigated in the human and feminist sciences, is made invisible by the
narratives that dominate these fields, which highlights how racism and sexism structure the
production of knowledge, relegating some subjects to the margins. I therefore understand that
the racialization of motherhood is particularly relevant in Brazil, where the legitimate
representations of this role are based on a colonial and patriarchal model, far removed from
the reality of most people. According to the interlocutors of this research, their experiences
with motherhood were marked, above all, by the sharing of care, the centrality of women in
the family organization, the expansion of this role beyond the biological mother and the
extension of care across different generations. Thus, I found that there is a plurality of
perceptions that emerge from a location and they tend to incorporate collective demands,
making maternal practices adapt to the context in which they are inserted.
