The Patriarchal State and its Limits: On Domestic Workers' Experiences with Equal Labor Rights in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

San José

Congreso; 117th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting: Change in the Anthropological Imagination; 2018

American Anthropological Association

In 2013, the Argentine state promulgated Law 26844, a landmark legislation that ended more than half a century of de jure discrimination against domestic workers and of de facto discrimination against women, given that 98.5% of domestic workers in Argentina are women (Gorbán 2012). In this way, Argentina advanced toward undoing the infamous legacy of second-class citizenship status women have held throughout Argentina´s history (Giordano 2013). This paper examines ethnographically how the legal reconfiguration of domestic workers from "servants" with almost no labor rights to "workers" with full labor rights translates into the daily lives of domestic workers in Buenos Aires. I draw from the experiences of care-takers, cooks, and cleaners who were acutely familiar with the new legislative framework--from formal education on Law 26844 and from personal experience having worked under formal employment contracts as stipulated by Law 26844. I suggest that despite the egalitarian aspirations of a legislation that, in the words of former President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, is "equalizing of rights," significant contradictions remain in the state´s attempt to remedy the foundational gendered exclusions the state generated--through the historical division between the public, androcentric sphere of politics and work and the private, feminine, a-political sphere of family. Domestic workers´ experiences with the Argentine state´s attempt to render the private sphere a sphere of work make manifest the ways in which the modern, capitalist state remains a heteropatriarchal institution (MacKinnon 1989; Pateman 1988) limited in its capacity to fully recognize women as political subjects.