Precarious freedoms: Domestic work, dependency and the afterlives of slavery in Brazil

This article examines how domestic work in Brazil is shaped by the afterlives of slavery, showing how racialised and gendered structures organise relations of dependency, exclusion and domination. Drawing on fieldwork with domestic workers in Pelotas and historical analysis of domestic labour during and after slavery, it interrogates the recent turn to the language of ‘modern slavery’ in public and academic discourse in Brazil. By framing exploitation as an exceptional moral rupture, this discourse individualises abuse and detaches labour subordination from the legacies of slavery and racial capitalism. Against this framing, the article develops the concept of precarious freedom to show how domestic workers’ lives are shaped not by a binary between slavery and freedom, but by coercive mechanisms embedded in relations of socio-economic dependency, legal regulations and affective governance. This reframes exploitation in domestic work as a constitutive feature of racialised-gendered capitalist relations rather than an exceptional violation.