Trabalho do cuidado não remunerado: desigualdades, juridicidade e litígios de família

Abstract

Unpaid care work refers to a fundamental multifaceted set of activities for the reproduction and maintenance of human life, mostly and historically performed by women, directly impacting the conditions of exploitation of female labor in an invisible and undervalued way. By scope, this research aims primarily to foster discussion on the legal consequences of unpaid care work for the enjoyment of the fundamental right to equality, as well as to deepen the relationship between this reality and the role of Family Law, admitting it as the first factual-legal axis of connection with care work. Therefore, in the first chapter, I establish a theoretical-conceptual and historical framework about care as an object of academic research, extracted from a feminist and materialist perspective, and contextualize it to the crises of care experienced cyclically by the suffocation of the conditions of social reproduction in light of the formulations of Nancy Fraser and to the specific contours of this crisis in Brazil with the theoretical apparatus of Nadya Guimarães and Helena Hirata. In the second chapter, I present and analyze more upto-date quantitative data from the PNAD-C regarding household chores and caregiving. I then examine the historical path of invisibility of unpaid care work, based on its depoliticization, its long-standing concealment from socioeconomic statistics and economic studies, and the pernicious Brazilian colonial slavery legacy responsible for the objectification of black and indigenous women and the devaluation of their work. In the last chapter, I link this reality of inequality to constitutional law through the fundamental right to equality and the value of opportunities lost by women overburdened by unpaid care work. I then investigate the legality of care by seeking its semantic meaning in the national legal system, mapping it and identifying the legal content of care as a right and a duty. In the meantime, I also construct a critique of the emptying of the economic value of care through the rhetoric of love, based on the General Theory of Affection by Conrado Paulino and Cristiano Chaves. Finally, I address family disputes and consider strategies to circumvent the systematic devaluation of care work in the Judiciary. As for the scientific method used, the research is inductive – as it seeks to fill a consistent gap in the identification of the legality of care in Brazilian Law, as well as the indices that reveal the reality experienced in the daily lives of Brazilians in terms of participation and time dedicated to this element, in order to ultimately respond to the hypothesis of the imbalance in the experience of the right to equality from the perspective of the sexual division of labor and the accumulation of working hours between productive (paid work) and reproductive (unpaid care work). Regarding the approach to the problem, the research adopted a quali-quanti approach, as both quantitative statistical data and analyses of social phenomena are referenced.