Introduction

1. Scope of the semiotic analysis: discourse, forms of life, and culture

4At the end of the 1980s, when Brazil was finally opening up to democracy, José Luiz Fiorin published Language and Ideology, a work that to this day maintains its theoretical scope and importance. In his “Introduction” (1988, p. 6), for example, Fiorin states that “structural linguistics”, which for a while was treated as a pilot science of the other human sciences, came to be treated as “bourgeois linguistics” because it only observed the internal working mechanisms of language. At the time, he proposed as a solution to turn to the study of the “ideological determinations” in the “complex phenomenon that is language”, analyzing “how language conveys ideology [and] what is ideologized in language” (Fiorin, 1988, p. 7). Referring to Marx, Engels and Bakhtin, Fiorin goes on to say that “without language one cannot speak of a human psyche […] for what defines the content of consciousness are social factors that determine the concrete life of individuals in the conditions of the social environment” (Fiorin, 1988, p. 8). We also highlight in this work a theoretical elaboration that is still valid and that can greatly contribute to the most current developments in the field of semiotics:

• 7 Original in Portuguese: […] há no discurso o campo da manipulação consciente e o da determinação in (...)

[…] there is in discourse the field of conscious manipulation and that of unconscious determination [and] the set of semantic elements habitually used in the discourses of a given epoch constitutes the way of seeing the world in a given social formation [for] these elements arise from other discourses that are already constructed, crystallized, and whose conditions of production have been erased (Fiorin, 1988, p. 19).7

5If these elements “constitute consciousness and the way of thinking about the world”, certain themes and, therefore, certain forms of life, which we will delve into below, will be recurrent in the discourses (linguistic and non-linguistic practices) that culture produces. This is how standards of beauty, places and social roles are born, the appreciation or denigration of beliefs and customs. Thus, structures such as racism and sexism, as we will seek to highlight later, will establish themselves as socialization practices, as practices of the circulation and occupation of spaces and territories of social circulation, plans of expression (scenarios) of forms of life that are broadly organized and that end up being recognized as ways of culturally acting and interacting (Colas-Blaise, 2012).

6The study of the relations between linguistic and non-linguistic practices has allowed the recognition of how certain values have been imputed to certain identities, leading to unconscious and ideologically based naturalization processes. This is because what shapes culture is the “set of axiologies, ideologies, and social signifying practices” (Greimas; Courtès, 2008, p. 109), which can be characterized as “coherent and congruent signifying sets” that are “the forms of life” (Fontanille, 2016, p. 7).

7Not coincidentally, in closing their well-known text on the “Noble gesture”, Greimas and Fontanille (2014, pp. 31-32, emphasis added) say that “the study of forms of life could constitute a contribution, on the one hand, to the typology of discourses, and on the other, to the semiotics of cultures”. In the first case, the study of forms of life “would define types of ‘semiotic objects’”, in the second case, the forms of life:

[…] would participate in the establishment of the connotative taxonomies [by performing] the ordering of a plurality of parameters, apprehended from all levels of the generative trajectory, whose functioning would be recognized as a whole as coherent and globally recurrent (Greimas; Fontanille, 2014, pp. 31-32).

8The abbreviated and limited use of the concepts of discourse, forms of life, and culture in Greimas, Fiorin, and Fontanille, proposed here, does not present the necessary rigor to promote a conceptual or operational definition of culture.

10How, then, can we establish a relationship between these three ways of observing semiotic phenomena, that is, between the notion of discourse, practice and way of life? By distinguishing life forms from lifestyles, Fontanille and Perusset (2021, pp. 96-97) seem to lead us to an interesting answer: life forms can establish interactions with a non-living environment (an infrastructural environment), and cross, therefore, any level of analysis—unlike lifestyles that only emerge from interpersonal or intersubjective (informal or institutional) relationships. It is for this reason that forms of life allow us to access domains of culture that, in a given discourse, are sometimes manifested as idiosyncrasies. In this case, the discourse can hide an infrastructural dimension of culture, if we think of a meaning close to that of Marxism, in which the ruling classes end up making use of force (the State) or ideology seeking to maintain the status quo.

11In the same direction we find Marion Colas-Blaise (2012), who presents us with a very operative distinction of what the forms of life would be and the way in which they can be taken for the analysis of the processes of individualization and generalization that take place in culture. For Colas-Blaise, there is a movement, within the culture, of forms of life that move towards “archiforms of life”, in a process of “culturalization” (establishment of infrastructure?). For a form of life to “feed culture”, by “filling a story, circumscribing a cultural group, and pouring into it a plurality of actors”, there must be a generalization of forms of life from particularization. That is, it is necessary that there is an unraveling of the forms “‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’ […] towards a ‘he’, a ‘there’ and a ‘then’, which ensures the stabilization of forms of life” (Colas-Blaise, 2012). The relationship between forms of life and culture is established through the “archi-form of life”: these are more generic and encompass the forms of life that will be performed in more diverse and “identity” shapes. According to this viewpoint, culture can be understood as “the unity of a symbolic structure in which the ‘archi-forms of life’ are reversed, which have their roots in the bodily projection of cultural forms” (Colas-Blaise, 2012), in a feedback movement that can be of the order of the continuous or the discontinuous.

12This conceptualization of Colas-Blaise is close to that of Fontanille and Zilberberg, for whom, from the point of view of the semiotics of cultures, the notion of form of life highlights the sensitive rooting of collective symbolic organizations (2001, p. 152). For us, as well as for Fontanille and Colas-Blaise, forms of life become a privileged instance to recognize a “dialectic of the collective and the singular; of permanence and change” (Colas-Blaise, 2021), insofar as their content is schematic (if one understands scheme as selection), and insofar as they integrate and adjust particular schemes (Fontanille; Zilberberg, 2001, pp. 153-155).

2. The occurrence-text: linguistic usages, semiotic practices and way of life

Ideology is, first of all, a practice.
Silvio Almeida, 2020, p. 66.

14For this reason, by mobilizing this concept, we want to show how certain social practices, as well as certain figures and certain spaces (social and architectural) promote and strengthen forms of life very specific to Brazilian culture, which appear on the surface to be the product of an exercise in mixing or miscegenation (whose myth of racial paradise works as evidence), but which, in depth, are complex mechanisms for the screening of identities; a screening that can be perceived today in a much clearer way, considering the growing number of researchers, journalists, and writers, women and men, who have been working on this issue.

15It is possible to treat, indiscriminately, discourse (semiotic process that manifests itself in various occurrence-texts), practices (acts that develop in the form of scenes), and forms of life (connotative taxonomies, entities, “coherent deformation” (Schwartzmann, 2013, p. 1455). There are, however, distinctions between these three levels of relevance: practices can inaugurate forms of lives that, in culture, go on being registered and materialized in certain discourses. The practices, in turn, by their repetition and by the regularity of the articulations of their practical scenes among themselves, result in forms of life, and, at the end of procedures of strategic accommodation, they are presented as the experience of an ethos (at the limit of stereotyping), and may represent a kind of cultural identity, a common feeling of belonging that covers the actors in a given society. It is a phenomenon of translation from one level of pertinence to another, from one semiotic to another. But how, after delimiting the corpus, to proceed to the analysis?

16Semiotic analysis has always been an exercise in reformulating signification in a constructed metalanguage, allowing it to be defined as “description” or “explanation”, that is, as “metalinguistic translation” of immanent signification (Fontanille, 2008a, p. 44). In this way, the “generative trajectory of meaning went from being a simulacrum of the production of meaning to a sequence of experiences of meaning, that is, a sequence of procedures to be employed to produce meaning” (Fontanille, 2008a, p. 45). According to Fontanille (2008a, pp. 43-44), the “semiotic explanation has changed its status many times: (1) “hierarchy of semiotic levels” (descriptive, methodological and epistemological levels); (2) “relationship between metassemiotic levels […] thanks to the notion of ‘intertextuality’ (or ‘interdiscursivity’)” and, more currently, (3) the relation between levels of pertinence in which “each level is defined by its own field of expression, corresponding to different types of experience, so that each is irreducible to the other […] [through] operations of integration and/or rhetorical syncopes, and [of] the intermediary object-semiotics” (Fontanille, 2008a, p. 44).

17And here we are more directly interested in the problem of syncopations. As is already known, the procedures of integration between the levels of immanence of semiotic analysis do not respect its ascending canonical form (from practices to forms of life) and, in the same way, it follows an inverse, descending order (from practices to texts-utterances). Integration procedures are often established by fittings that do not occur between two subsequent levels, in the form of irregular integrations, between levels that are disjointed. It is precisely these forms of irregular integration that we call syncopes—which can be ascending or descending. Ascending syncopations are those in which one or more levels in the path of integration are surpassed, either in situations in which we go from the text-utterance (from the discourse, to a certain extent, therefore) directly to the forms of life, or in situations in which we start from objects directly to strategies. The same occurs with descending syncopes, only in the opposite direction. In the first case we have a chaining of levels, a summation relationship, and in the second case there is a reduction in the number of dimensions. And the two paths are not opposed to each other, so that, in the ascending direction, a text can appear inscribed in an object, being able to be manipulated in a practice and, in the descending one, a way of life can be entirely symbolized by a single practical scene, or even, in an even greater syncopation, enacted in a text-utterance.

18Ascending syncopations indicate both the constitution of prefigurations and textual representations of practices: in the first case, we would have a text, image or object that indicates, a priori, an integrated practice and in the second case, we would have, a posteriori, textualization, verbal or imagery, for example, of any practice: objects and practices can be presented in a textual form. It is precisely this type of syncopated integration that seems to undo the textual domain of semiotics since, as Fontanille (2008a, p. 28) says, “it gives a semiotic status” to sociocultural situations that “may not contain any ’sign-figure’, any ’text-utterance’ and, a fortiori, have no relation to any verbal manifestation” and vice versa.

19When a practice or way of life is textualized, we have a process of reduction, of condensation of properties and dimensions: integrated into a text, a practice ends up reduced only to textual manifestation; integrated with an object, a strategy presents only one corporeal/object manifestation; and a form of life integrated with a figure-sign will only have a figurative manifestation. For Fontanille (2008b, p. 63), these descending integration processes will only be effective when a descending syncope (a form of life manifested in a text or practice) allows an ascending unfolding of it: which seems to be precisely the case that we wish to discuss. An extreme case of condensation in the descending and syncopated path that allows the ascending unfolding is the phenomenon of symbolization, that is, a practice, or even an entire way of life, can be symbolized from the production of a great syncopation from the last level to the first: the domestic as a symbol of a racist archiform of life in Brazil.

20In Linguagem e Ideologia (Fiorin, 1988, p. 55), which we have already mentioned, we find an interesting example that allows us to advance in our understanding of the relations between discourse, forms of life, and culture, from this perspective of syncopations and condensation. According to Fiorin:

• 11 Original in Portuguese: O discurso transmitido contém em si, como parte da visão de mundo que veicu (...)

The transmitted discourse contains within itself, as part of the worldview it conveys, a value system, that is, stereotypes of human behavior that are valued positively or negatively. It conveys behavioral taboos. Society transmits to individuals—with language and thanks to it—certain stereotypes, which determine certain behaviors. These stereotypes become so ingrained in the consciousness that they are taken for granted. Figures like “black”, “communist”, “whore” have a content full of prejudice, dislike, and hostility while others like “white”, “wife” are imbued with positive feelings. We must not forget that stereotypes are only in language because they represent the condensation of a social practice.11

23It is for this reason that we delimit our search to one lexeme: housemaid. Our hypothesis is that we can understand the system of dehumanization of a class of people (a value system) and describe how it has been maintained until today as its crystallization in the concept-idea “housemaid”.

24In order to compile the occurrence-texts in which we intend to indicate the existence of the “housemaid” figure-form of life, we will resort to what we have been calling value systems crystallized in the language, such as: (1) the stabilized sociocultural connotations in the form of common sense, which reverberate in (2) the discourses of institutions (such as religion, state, media) supported by (3) the Law. The selected examples present themselves as a complex web of values that allow us to identify racism and class feeling as founding forms of Brazilian culture.

25For philosopher Silvio Almeida, “the cultural and political life within which individuals recognize themselves as self-conscious subjects and where they form their affections is constituted by patterns of racial cleavage in the imagination and everyday social practices” (Almeida, 2020, p. 64). In Brazil, “normal life, affections and truths are inexorably permeated by racism that does not depend on conscious action to exist” (Almeida, 2020, p. 64).

26This determination is reinforced by social apparatuses (practical actants) that weave a cultural imaginary around black people, which, as Silvio Almeida states, is reinforced “by the media, the cultural industry, the educational system” (Almeida, 2020, p. 65), by literature and by political and legal practices. The prevalence of hegemonic values (whiteness, Christianity, capitalism, among others) in these systems, in these social practices, creates a simulacrum of reality: there is the impression that black people are represented in fiction, in law, in literature according to the places (practical scenes or environment) they actually occupy in the world. That is, “racist ideology is not a representation of material reality, of concrete relationships but the representation of the relationships we have with these concrete relationships” (Almeida, 2020, pp. 65-66). Even though other representations appear in these ideological systems—to keep the term he uses—representations that seek to combat racism, “inequality and difference appear in a stylized way, as a theme of meditation or advertising so that they can be integrated to the normality of social life” (Almeida, 2020, pp. 73-74). Thus, racism is sustained by the maintenance of this social imaginary, which has been affirmed by the uninterrupted repetition, over the centuries, of social discourses and practices that have crystallized, making biological and social determinants (such as gender and class) “naturally ” associated with race.

27In Black skin, white masks, Frantz Fanon (2008) will state that in western (or westernized) societies the “black is not a man” (2008, p. 26), since his existence is in a relationship of dependence on that of the other, the white, who took away his humanity. He advances the question seeking to demonstrate that it is not an individual or subjective problem but rather social, cultural and material. Thus, in the same way as Silvio Almeida, Frantz Fanon recognizes that a “normality of social life”, built in the midst of concrete racist social practices, cannot be changed only by discourse because an authentic de-alienation—the repair of the lack!—can only take place at another level, within the scope of social practices.

28For the authors, the construction and maintenance of racism and class feeling, especially in Brazil, is a complex but quite stable social phenomenon, which is not limited to the world of discourse; they are effectively operations of integration and/or syncope, rhetoric between different levels of pertinence that result in (arch)forms of life that will regulate social life. The case of the verbal use of housemaid, precisely for this reason, is exemplary: from domestic slave to domestic servant, what has changed?

29Black people were marginalized, not having the right to “education, health, housing, leisure, surviving on the exploitation of their labor force in secondary and subordinated jobs, earning the worst wages, in unhealthy conditions, with black women being the most exploited” (Pereira; Roseno, 2018, p. 97). As can be assumed, certain social practices were organized in this scenario, allowing behaviors, styles, and actions that might seem random to become “a stricto sensu semiotic practice” (Fontanille, 2014): both from the point of view of social and behavioral organizations considered marginal (capoeira, candomblé, favelas, samba) and from the point of view of those considered prestigious (martial arts and classical dance, Catholicism, condominiums, bossa nova). Forms of social interaction, experimentation of public and private spaces, dress codes, religiosity, and food end up being organized, persevering, lasting, from programming and adjustment (Fontanille, 2008b, pp. 130-140) crystallized in the term housemaid. Its simple use in any communication situation in Brazil, the construction of this figure in any discourse (legal, journalistic or literary), updates, through a process of symbolization (descending syncopation between the planes of immanence), countless practical scenes that circulate, like satellites around this central figure. And from the predicted scenes we can then extract the racist archiforms of life that will frame affections, forms of social coexistence, public and private architectural spaces, work, and interpersonal relationships.

30This is because, as Fontanille and Zilberberg (1998, p. 158) remind us, at the level of configurations, such as narrative strategies and interactive and passionate schemes, a form of life obeys the same criteria as isotopy, at the level of semes and sememes. A form of life could be considered as the distribution in phases—from screenings and mixtures—of selections operated at different levels. There would thus be a form of life from the moment that the enunciative praxis emerged as intentional, schematizable and aesthetic, that is, concerned with a plane of expression that is its own. In the case of the racist way of life, the social and cultural practices that organize and develop around the social actor “maid” allow us to recognize an enunciative praxis that, through typifications and schematizations, immediately produces recognizable sensible forms as “praxemes”. In this way, the enunciative praxis—the discourse, the practical scene by extension—ensures the coherence of a set of praxemes in a historically and ideologically determined culture.

31This is why we do not seek here only to observe the racist discourse, individual, product of a specific enunciation, conscious or unconscious, but also to recognize in the culture, from the observation of the several levels of pertinence, the recurrence of a racist experience (structural racism) that feeds discourses, practices, and forms of life. The materialization of racism, its occurrence in the discourse, is not the result of carelessness with language, it is not an isolated or fortuitous, individual action as the discourses that deny it try to affirm. Racism is not a misunderstanding, a problem of interpretation or a poor elaboration of ideas. It is not an individual lifestyle, the result of localized forms of social interaction, determined by “characteristics of the actors involved in the interactions” and that would derive “from the typology and description of social interactions and the phenomena of signification apprehended from the perspective of these same interactions” (Fontanille, 2014, p. 55). Racism is an organized and coherent mode of action, an “efficient semiotic practice” (Fontanille, 2008a, pp. 54-55), a style of action that sits on and correlates with other social practices, connecting forms of life and archetypes of life that are widespread in culture.

3. Practices of the institutionalization of racism: tradition, family and property

32As we have already said, our goal is to outline how certain social practices, understood as stable semiotic practices, which not fortuitously became certain racist and classist forms of life. And, as we have also indicated, the social behaviors that lead to the experience of corporal practices, uses of spaces, and construction of marginalized and segregated identities have remained in Brazil today not only in words, habits and customs: in the Law, the changes that have occurred have only “disguised” the conservation of institutional forms of violence against black people.

33The Imperial Constitution granted by Dom Pedro I in 1824 remained in force until 1889, allowing slave labor, “about which it formally kept silence” (Prudente, 1988, p. 136). As for the enslaved black people, for almost four hundred years they were useful objects of purchase and sale and belonged to the class of chattels, together with to livestock, subject to mortgage and rent. Upon the death of the owner, they entered the “inheritance, and, together with the other assets, were shared among the heirs” (Prudente, 1988, p. 136). The Law conducted social relations, promoting or restraining certain practices: taken as objects, depersonalized, men, women and children lost the right to “life, liberty, name, image, intellectual creation” (Prudente, 1988, p. 137), to their own bodies, since the slave trade, legalized and legitimized by the state and society, separated “loved ones, preventing the formation of the basic social nucleus, the family” (Prudente, 1988, p. 138, emphasis added), strengthening the depersonalization process. A quick comparison with the European and Japanese immigration at the end of the 19th century allows us to recognize in family identity its success (Prudente, 1988, p. 138): the maintenance of kinship, cultural and linguistic traditions, as well as the euphorization of genealogy, allowed these identities to gain shape, even becoming part of the regional identities of the country. In the case of the black people, their origin, languages, and other cultural practices were all reduced to the amalgam of a single identity, faceless, without particularity, whose body—symbolic and physical—served only for exploitation.

34This semiotic operation of the passage from the discourse of Law to the construction of forms of coexistence and social exchanges, marked by rupture and by the erasure of subjectivity, is registered in various texts. The advertisements that were published until the end of the 19th century are well known, and one could read phrases such as: “For Sale: very young black woman with offspring”; “I need to hire a maidservant who can cook”, among other aberrations. In other words, this scenario of segregation, depersonalization and racism did not change in the passage from the 19th to the 20th century and remains intact in the 21st century. This is evidenced by the fact that, if “at the time of slavery, free-roaming black individuals were arrested ‘on suspicion of being slaves’, today they are arrested on other grounds” (Schwarscz; Starling, 2018, pp. 92-93). As Myrian dos Santos (2004, p. 145) explains, in the 1890 Penal Code, “there were articles that turned beggars, drunks, vagrants, and capoeiras into misdemeanors subject to imprisonment”. The following were considered crimes, according to the Law: “to beg, while in good health and in condition to work”; “to become drunk as a habit, or to appear in public in a state of obvious drunkenness”; “to perform in the streets and public squares exercises of agility and bodily dexterity known as capoeiragem”; “to run about with weapons or instruments capable of causing bodily harm, provoking riots or disorder, threatening a certain or uncertain person, or instilling fear of some evil” (Santos, 2004, pp. 165-166, emphasis added).

35Now, as we have already pointed out, at the end of the 19th century, with the abolition of slavery, “freed black people, in great numbers, moved to the cities in search of opportunities and when they got there they could not be absorbed in paid activities” (Santos, 2004, p. 145). Thus, the legislation of the time—which in practice has barely changed—specifically criminalized freed black people.

37Thus, the naturalization of violent police action against black people is a clear case of the manifestation of whiteness since the way the police act is modulated according to relations of otherness that are built in well-defined practical scenes. In this case, the forms of life make semiotic practices operate in a way that will prevent the realization, in public spaces, of the practical scenes of the street and of free life in the cities for black people.

38The institutionalization of the annihilation of black people, as a coherent semiotic practice, began with human trafficking, continued in the post-abolition period, and was perpetuated in legal form at the end of the first half of the 20th century. Decree-Law no. 7,967, of September 18, 1945, signed by Getúlio Vargas, declared, in its Article no. 2, the need to prioritize the admission of immigrants, since it was necessary to “preserve and develop, in the ethnic composition of the population, the most convenient characteristics of their European ancestry, as well as the defense of the national worker” (Prudente, 1988, p. 142, emphasis added). The arrival of European immigrants confirmed the valorization of whiteness forms of life, literally decreeing what would be the living spaces and the nature of the work that black people should perform from the 20th century on, even if “free”:

• 17 Original in Portuguese: A nação brasileira, comandada por gente [branca], nunca fez nada pela massa (...)

The Brazilian nation, commanded by [white] people, never did anything for the black mass that built it. It denied them ownership of any piece of land to live and cultivate, of schools where they could educate their children, of any kind of assistance. It gave them nothing but discrimination and repression. A large part of them went to the cities, where they found a less hostile social environment. They originally formed the so-called African neighborhoods, which gave way to the slums (Ribeiro, 1995, p. 222).17

39As Darcy Ribeiro reports, the Law made the black person’s space for work, housing and public circulation even more precarious. The land was given to the white immigrant, as well as the best jobs. Thus, a nation was created within the nation, sedimenting a racial identity that also became social. Black people of the twentieth century thus did not inherit a cultural heritage or a nationality, nor a prestigious past or an eminent representation of national cohesion (Fiorin, 2009, p. 116). They inherited the precariousness of life; they inherited forms of life marked by exploitation, by survival, by resilience.

40Until 2013 Brazilian legislation objectively maintained an irregular and discriminatory work situation: among all the categories of workers formally recognized, one remained lacking rights and regulation: the domestic worker, the housemaid. Only the Constitutional Amendment Proposal (PEC) —which became known as the “Housemaid’s C.A.P” (PEC das domésticas) —would finally give labor rights to this class of workers. The “Constitutional Amendment” was signed in April 2015, by the then President Dilma Rousseff (PT), extending to domestic workers the same rights as other workers governed by the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT), such as the Length-of-Service Guarantee Fund (FGTS), unemployment insurance, family allowance, night work bonus, and travel bonus.

41Domestic servants or domestic workers are those who provide continuous, non-profit services to a person or to a family in the home, as established by Law no. 5.859 of 1972. According to this law, examples of domestic employees’ occupations are butler, driver, housekeeper, nanny, gardener, housemaid, housekeeper, and caretaker. These are functions that, in Brazil, are almost entirely performed by black people. If we make a cut by gender, the figures seem even more “familiar”: housemaids, housekeepers, and servants. From the point of view of the forms of life condensed in these professions, there is a very important semantic feature: the domestic (from the Latin domus: house, habitation, dwelling), which outlines the space and dwelling of these subjects.

42Their coexistence with the family environment, which sometimes gives them the status of being “almost family members” (especially in the Brazilian common sense) seems to still have ancestry in the Latin culture, since “family” originally meant the set of someone’s properties, including slaves, servants, entourage, as well as relatives. As indicated by Miquel Bassols (2016, p. 8):

[…] in Latin, famulus means slave, serf, servant, subject. Originally, the family was equivalent to the sphere of possession and the order of the whole estate, which included both relatives and servants who ate in the master’s house. Thus, the master signifier is present in the origin of the symbolic organization that we know as family in all its structures.

43The senses of family, of family space, of possession and property that are organized in the space of the house, in the relationship between master and servants, also reveal its patriarchal dimension, because it is patrimonial. Patriarchy could then be interpreted here as an archi-form of life that also connects to racism. A hypothesis that we will not advance at this time.

44In this scenario, the Law, as a stabilized discourse that regulates a social practice, is able to give contours to an ideological relationship with reality, restricting the spaces of circulation, the nature of their occupations, in short, the materiality of the life of the subjects, mostly black women, imposing them on forms of life. That is, the Law is imposed as a collective enunciative praxis that fossilizes behaviors into mandatory “uses” (Greimas; Fontanille, 2014, pp. 18-19): the housemaids, naturally belonging to the domain of the home, are not recognized as workers.

45To escape this cultural imposition and for new forms of life to be (re)founded, it would be necessary to put into practice an individual rupture, such as that promoted by the noble gesture, which is established by the refusal, by the abstention, as Greimas and Fontanille (2014, pp. 27-28) point out. This rupture could also be, according to Colas-Blaise (2012), promoted by cultural games, which are “free actions” that are not solidly implanted in the life world, that are not connected to life archi-forms and that are, therefore, “relieved of the weight of habituality”, being able to be extraordinary.

46Disruption may exist or even have already existed, as Angela Davis (2016, p. 26) points out: “like all social phenomena, housework is a dynamic product of human history. Just as economic systems emerge and disappear, the scope and quality of household chores have undergone radical transformations”. The communist philosopher confirms our impressions that the origin of the family, with the strengthening of patriarchy, has reconditioned the value system, thus hierarchizing gender roles: “as Friedrich Engels argues in his classic work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, sexual inequality, as we know it today, did not exist before the advent of private property”, since, “during the first eras of human history, the sexual division of labor within the system of economic production was complementary rather than hierarchical” (Davis, 2016, p. 227, emphasis added). Since the origin of the family, at that time there seems to have been no rupture. On the contrary, social practices remain stable, regulated by the patriarchal archi-form of life, correlated to that of whiteness.

47A very significant example is that of a publication on the official website of the Chamber of Deputies (the body unequivocally responsible for systematizing, proposing and changing the Law in Brazil), of November 21st, 2012, which reports the approval of the “PEC das domésticas” (Housemaid’s C.A.P), as quoted below:

• 18 The only two votes against the C.A.P were cast by deputies Roberto Balestra (PP-GO) and Zé Vieira ( (...)
• 19 Original in Portuguese: O Plenário aprovou nesta quarta-feira (21), em primeiro turno, por 359 voto (...)

The Plenary session approved on Wednesday (21), in first round, by 359 votes to 218, the Housemaid’s C.A.P (Constitutional Amendment Proposal 478/10), which extends the labor rights of housemaids, nannies, cooks, and other workers in households […] Lawmakers in favor of the matter highlighted that the extension of rights to domestic workers symbolizes a second abolition in the country, since many domestic workers are black, and their families came out of slavery into domestic work, as highlighted by Congresswoman Janete Rocha Pietá (PT-SP). ”It is the beginning of the freedom of black workers who came out of slavery into domestic work", she said. Congressman Amauri Teixeira (PT-BA) also used the word liberation to refer to the C.A.P. “Domestic workers still live in a situation of semi-slavery, without a defined minimum working shift, without overtime, without night bonuses”, he said (Triboli, 2012, emphasis added).19

48We can highlight, in the news from the Chamber, that the deputies are elevated to the dimension of operators of a practical scene of liberation, whose liberated actors are essentially black women. The scene that is repeated here, as the text itself indicates, is that of abolition, in an interval of more than 120 years. But this abolition has the same nature as the first one, inchoactive, we could say, and not terminative, as it should be. It opens space for the non-performance of the action, which remains a project, a performance whose sanction remains undefined. In this way, the housemaid remains captive to her social place and her color.

49Another passage is also very significant for understanding the event. The individual who was not yet president of this country, at the time, did not register his vote but criticized the approval of the C.A.P:

• 20 Original in Portuguese: O deputado Jair Bolsonaro (PP-RJ) criticou a proposta que, na sua avaliação (...)

Congressman Jair Bolsonaro (PP-RJ) criticized the proposal that, in his evaluation, will increase the cost of housemaids and discourage employers. “Because of the C.A.P, I will have to pay daycare for my son’s nanny. The mass of workers in Brazil cannot afford this”, he said. Bolsonaro did not register a vote (Triboli, 2012, emphasis added).20

50Let us ignore the fallacious arguments. What stands out here is a rhetoric (known to all now more than ever) based on a logic marked by economic advantage: the C.A.P makes housemaids more expensive. When addressing the history of the slave system built by the Portuguese, Schwarscz and Starling (2018, p. 80) recall that “Portuguese contact with black Africa […] preceded the discovery of Brazil by up to half a century […] at that time [1453] Portugal’s interest was more focused on gold, and slaves […] were only secondary motivations”. Still at that time, when the Portuguese began to traffic slaves, “these were primarily destined for Europe to fulfill domestic tasks” (2018, p. 80, emphasis added). With the cultivation of sugarcane on Brazilian soil, this practice spread and took on a different form, causing enslaved labor to become “the real foundation of society” (Schwarscz; Starling, 2018, p. 79). That is, the basis of the Portuguese slave society that later developed in Brazil already resided in a practice of advantage and ownership: the Portuguese owned domestic slaves because it was advantageous: “the economic advantages were such that they ensured the continuity” of the use of domestic slaves until 1850, when “trafficking, but not slavery, became extinct in Brazil” (Schwarscz; Starling, 2018, p. 88).

4. Almost Like Family

52In Brazil, there are, on the one hand, practices that have been removing from black identities their human dimension: without humanity, there is no need for rights. On the other hand, there is the continuity of forms of life that were formed before slavery in America, which lasted 400 years, and that would only be slightly altered in the 21st century. These forms of life, especially marked by submission and servitude, were covered by discourses that attenuated the violence and villainy of the slavery process. Important works such as Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves (2006) and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil (2007) show that the logics of abuse and exploitation were built in the realm of intimacy, as if there was affection in the exchanges between masters and slaves. In this regard, the following excerpt from Gilberto Freyre, which we quote below, is exemplary:

• 22 Na ternura, na mímica excessiva, no catolicismo em que se deliciam nossos sentidos, na música, no (...)

In the tenderness, in the excessive mimicry, in the Catholicism that delights our senses, in the music, in the walk, in the speech, in the lullaby, in everything that is a sincere expression of life, we almost all carry the mark of the black influence. Of the slave or maid who cradled us. Who breastfed us. Who spoon-fed us, herself holding a bowl of food in her hand. Of the old black woman who told us the first stories about animals and ghosts (Freyre, 2006, p. 367).22

53The idea of almost genetic belonging to the black woman who breastfed him, the emphasis on the practical scene of motherhood, are aimed at mitigating the demeaning condition of the black woman. In order to breastfeed and spoon-feed, the black woman had certainly left her own child to God’s will. Tenderness masquerades the abandonment, the care for the child masquerades the carelessness with the life of the woman herself, who is not even the owner of her own life. Old black woman, slave or maid are realized in Freyre’s discourse in a metonymic way: mimicry, voice, breast, hand. Without wholeness, without name, without history, the black women are fragments that serve very specific scenes of the life of the family in the Master’s House. Moreover, the linguistic uses, such as the use of the possessive pronoun that always follows the lexeme housemaid (my, your), lies in the understanding of yesteryear that the servants of the house, the slaves, were movable goods, alongside the livestock and possessions of the masters.

54As for the house itself, the Brazilian architecture itself will maintain the spaces of ample coexistence and the spaces restricted to the masters and servants: the housemaid’s room (often used even in the diminutive form: quartinho) and the kitchen are its spaces. The contemporary representations are known to all in Brazil: service elevator, service entrance, etc. Everything is very close, right there, but with very well-defined limits. From the spatial proximity, a false reality was built: “we immediately point out the sweetness in the relations of masters with domestic slaves, perhaps greater in Brazil than in any other part of America” (Freyre, 2006, p. 435). This scenario produced by the academic discourse varnished with truth and reality the ideological forms of the discourse on slavery in Brazil, which was repeated in several other spaces.

• 27 Original in Portuguese: Como todos se lembram da fase em que existiam empregadas! Acordei leitores (...)

How everyone misses the times when there were maids! I woke up readers of all ages and places. Of course, I am remembering only the sweetness of a time when we were employees, but we also had housemaids, which made things possible in life that would not be possible nowadays. […] The one who ironed our clothes stayed with us for about 30 years. During menopause she became a kleptomaniac […] The last one, who came from the northeastern backlands, I finally realized, spoke another language. The nouns I used; she didn’t know what they meant. And vice-versa. So, she kept quiet. The most basic words, such as saucer, butter dish, lychee (ah, that small jackfruit?), sparkling water, mayonnaise, paprika, purée, she kept for a definite clarification, the day I would add the object to the word. I don’t deny that she was very intelligent, just try yourself to work in the house of a Japanese man who doesn’t speak Portuguese. […] The salaries went up. And then came the ones I could least live with. The nouveau riche ones, who borrowed the status of their bosses. They knew the names of politicians, celebrities, and housewives. All their recipes contained condensed milk and nuts. They got goose bumps when they had to iron an old cambric shirt, very fresh, already worn out, plaid flannel pajamas of the new housewife. They lacked references to qualify people, and so they classified visitors by their cars. Snobs without a cause. Not to mention the perfect housemaid, better than you in everything, the I-miss-Bahia one, the Law-student one, and others. It’s enough to make you cry (Horta, 2011, emphases added).27

58There are also other forms of prejudice, such as xenophobia and the denial of the right to higher education, crystallizations about the housemaid that we will find, in a very productive way, in Brazilian cinema, theater, and literature in general. The clash of cultures and forms of life is visible and is also registered in the household lexicon enumerated by Horta: saucers, butter, lychee, sparkling water, mayonnaise, paprika, purée are “basic words” of a given class—made up of white people—linked to routines, habits and practices of coexistence and eating. In the case of lychee, mayonnaise, paprika and purée, they are intercultural figures, recognizable only by actors who circulate among diverse cultural logics. Saucers and sparkling water are of the order of excess, luxury, or superfluous: they have no essential function in the logic of the house.

59Another case that deserves attention is that of the writer Lya Luft, who has written true theses in which she argues that the best thing for the poor class would be to remain poor. In “Steps of Illusion” (Luft, 2012), we can read the following:

• 29 Original in Portuguese: Fala-se muito na ascensão das classes menos favorecidas, formando uma “nova (...)

There is a lot of talk about the rise of the less favored classes, forming a “new middle class”, achieved by steps that lead to another social and economic (cultural, I dare not say) level. In theory, this would be a great step towards reducing the catastrophic inequality that reigns here. But I fear that, the way it is being carried out, it is an illusion that may end up in serious problems for those who deserve better. Everyone wants a dignified life for the dispossessed, good schooling for the illiterate, optimal public services for the entire population, that is, education, health, transportation, electricity, security, water, and everything that decent citizens need […] I come from a middle class in which we grew up with four basic teachings: have your graduation diploma, have your own house, have your savings, and work hard to maintain and, who knows, expand this. To ensure an old age independent of help from children or strangers; to leave children something with which they could start their own lives with dignity. Such teachings seem abolished, prudence and caution seem outdated, the desire to grow steadily and build a more secure life little encouraged.29

60This idea of capital accumulation, a basic teaching of Luft’s middle class, is also present in Danuza’s social logic, gaining even more shades of ostentation:

• 30 As we could indicate before, the country invested deeply in European colonization, offering subsidi (...)
• 31 Original in Portuguese: […] um homem que começa do nada, por exemplo: no início de sua vida, ter um (...)

[…] a man who starts from nothing30, for example: at the beginning of his life, having an apartment was an almost impossible ambition; but now, being successful, if you say you are thinking of buying one of less than 800 square meters, swimming pool, sauna and grill, he will look at you with the greatest contempt—if he looks at all (Leão, 2012).31

61One cannot forget that Luft’s discourse is set against a social phenomenon that shook Brazilian structures: the Lula Era. In this period, also a background to the texts of Leão and Horta, social ascension became a fact, changing practices of occupation of spaces in the cities (airports becoming symbols of this new occupation), practices of socialization and leisure, practices of school and academic formation, which evidently forced the paradigms of Brazilian culture. Those who really had nothing started to have something, and the stigmatization of the poor, treated as ignorant or devoid of culture, meritocracy, and class resentment, started to circulate more frequently in society chronicles, daily newspapers, and other media vehicles. Not by chance, almost ten years later, Minister Paulo Guedes said in an interview to the Folha de S. Paulo (Nov. 3th, 2019, emphasis added), in a much less euphemistic way than Luft, that “a boy, from an early age, knows that he is a being of responsibility when he has to save. The rich capitalize their resources. The poor consume everything”. These discourses are the result of consolidated practices of maintaining the feeling of class, practices of oppression, of disqualification, of depersonalization.

Aninha is a quiet girl who works here at home. And, when she speaks, it is in a muffled voice. She rarely speaks. I, who never had a housemaid named Aparecida, every time I go to call Aninha, I can only think of calling her Aparecida. That’s because she is a mute apparition (Lispector, 1999, p. 47).

63There is in her narratives a deep logic of depersonalization that makes one not expect a housemaid to be a person, let alone an intelligent, “complicated” person. And this discovery ends up causing astonishment:

[…] suddenly—no, nothing is all of a sudden in her, everything seems like a continuation of the silence. So, continuing the silence, her voice came to me, “Do you write books?” I replied, a little surprised, that I did. She asked me, without stopping tidying up and without changing her voice, if I could lend her one. I was flustered. I was honest: I told her that she wouldn’t like my books because they were a bit complicated. Then, continuing to put things away, and with her voice even more muffled, she replied, “I like complicated things. I don’t like sugary water” (Lispector, 1999, p. 48).

64The examples here are punctual and limited. If we were to compile the presence of housemaids in Brazilian literature, cinema, and other arts in a more refined way, we would also find the narratives of abuse and “initiation” of sexuality of the man of the house with the housemaid of the family.

A few considerations

65What we see in the construction of Brazilian culture in relation to all those who serve someone, housemaids and cleaners, more often than not, are the values of a certain class, a certain intellectual elite—whiteness—, that shamelessly displays its self-interest, exposing its housemaids to the exploitation of their bodies that are diminished, disrespected, depersonalized, thus opposing diverse forms of life responsible for evidencing oppositions that are at the base of racism and class prejudice: identity vs otherness; empathy vs contempt; superiority vs inferiority; civilization vs barbarism.

66However, even in the face of all these discourses, these so evident oppositions, and all these excluding practices, it is still very widely and frequently stated that in Brazil everyone is equal. It is widely known that the expression “having one’s foot in the kitchen”, as uttered by FHC, is itself a whole predicative scene: the place where one experiences life (the kitchen and the implications of being in the kitchen and the services connected to the kitchen) amalgamated, naturally, with the color of one’s skin.

67The crisis of the pandemic has forced us to review the spaces of work, of leisure, of idleness, of pleasure. The media and institutions in general, such as universities, state and municipal governments, have constructed a narrative about life in the pandemic. But we can’t fool ourselves: there is an architecture of bodies and classes that must be seen in detail because the subjects do not all live in the same spaces; they are not submitted to the same laws. In the case of this form of domestic life, it is a life forged inside someone else’s home, without rights, in an affective and social symbiosis.

68From the point of view of the texts and discourses that exemplify our reflections, these are the result of intertextual, interdiscursive, semiotic translation, and interpretation operations. It seems useful to us to resort to the model of practices and forms of life to proceed to an analysis of culture because it details or specifies the presence and hierarchization of certain phenomena. Here we are dealing with structural racism—or the archi-form of life of racism—which, by coordinating forms of life such as that of the mistress of the house (patroa), the master, the middle class, and the housemaid, defines and organizes the forms of living and coexistence in Brazilian culture, even delimiting which bodies and identities can live and which bodies and identities must be annihilated so that the model of life of some people does not change. In this sense, on the one hand, we can recognize forms of life that would be unstressed because they are subsumed into their environment, unable to exert any force of change, such as the way of life of the housemaid, and on the other hand, we have stresses forms of life that intend to or do dominate the environment, guaranteeing, as we have already said, the maintenance of the status quo and whiteness.

69What we have been able outline, in a rather imperfect way, was an example of how semiotic thinking can help us think about culture and our society—very complex objects—, making us better see the contours of semiotic processes, which are, after all, both linguistic and social, and that make us who we finally are. In his text on national identity, Fiorin (2009, p. 116) reminds us that a nation is born from “a postulate and an invention”. In the case of Brazil, as Darcy Ribeiro skillfully showed, the identity of the black person was invented by his or her tormentors: a slaveholding society made up of white men that left registered in its legislation, in its architecture, in its literary practices of exploitation and segregation of a whole set of people who have in common their skin color.