Social justice enters the kitchen. Controversies about pay for care work

Abstract

This work was conceived with the purpose of thinking about justice from the place from which it would always have been excluded: the home, with the kitchen as the quintessential representation of the private sphere and, therefore, of the non-political. The feminism of the 1970s would have, however, shown that the personal is also political and that the family, as a social institution, must also stand as an object of socio-economic justice. It is in this context that the debate about reproductive and care work originated, hidden and devalued as lacking salary. The third wave of feminism would have unmasked the networks of capital and revealed that, without the provision of food, care and attention that were satisfied by housewives, the accumulation of capital would be impossible. The purpose of this work is precisely to problematize the ambivalent nature of care as a condition of possibility and, at the same time, of subversion of capital. It is in light of this contradiction that the demand for wages for domestic work will be studied.