Black, women, domestic work, and intergeracional mobility: gramar of servitude and forms of refusal
Black womem, domestic work, social mobility, racial grammar, refusal
This part of the research presents a theoretical and conceptual foundation of a study on the intergenerational trajectories of Black women in Brazil, with a focus on the transition between paid domestic work (of mothers) and higher education (of their daughters). It begins with an epistemological critique of classical social mobility models, which are shown to be androcentric, Eurocentric, and prone to pathologizing Black lived experiences, and proposes an alternative analytical framework centered on the triad of racial grammar, practices of refusal, and projects of futurity. The argument posits that Black women's experiences are structured by a "grammar of servitude" (Spillers, 2021), which in Brazil takes on specific contours through the myth of racial democracy and the situational triad of the mulata, the domestic worker, and the mammy (mãe preta) (González, 2018). Against this grammar, which assigns them a "natural place" of servitude, Black women develop everyday practices of refusal and invest in
projects of futurity (Campt, 2017), thus paradoxically transforming domestic work into a platform for
mobility strategies. The article concludes that social mobility for Black women should be understood not
as linear ascent, but as a collective, intergenerational political act of grammatical disobedience, aimed at
decolonizing the social imaginary and rewriting the possibilities of Black existence.