The Bargaining Power of Love: Access to Rights, Affective Capital, and the Political Economy of Feelings in Paid Household Work in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Pittsburgh

Taller; GSWS Works-in-Progress; 2020

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh

Feminist ethnographers of paid household work have compellingly shown how the affective bonds and kin-like relationships that household workers share with their employers can often become sources of value extraction, exploitation and one of the primary obstacles to accessing formal labor rights (e.g., Brites (2014); Pereyra and Tizziani (2014); Romero (1992)). Drawing from the experiences of household workers with access to formal labor rights in Buenos Aires’ Metropolitan Area, Argentina, this essay looks instead at the ways in which love and trust produce economic value and can become one of the primary sources of bargaining power that household workers can count on in a context of entrenched intersectional structural inequality between them and their employers and general lack of regard for the rule of law. I argue that love and trust are oftentimes a form of capital—what I term “affective capital”—that workers can use to access formal labor rights, and one of the few resources they draw from and make use of in order to do so.