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This article presents a case study of the sexualization of paid domestic workers in the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. The author argues that the sexualization of workers is linked to historical concerns around purity and contamination. The article looks at the figure of Tlazolteotl, a pre-Hispanic goddess patroness of dust, filth and promiscuous women. It identifies the way colonial acts of translation might have informed concerns, meanings and practices that link ideas of dirt, sexuality and morality. The article explores experiences of sexual harassment among domestic workers that were interviewed and the role of female employers on the reproduction of ideas that define workers’ sexualities as ‘deviant’ and potentially contaminating.

The Lancet Commissions are widely known as aspirational pieces, providing the mechanisms for consortia and networks of researchers to organize, collate, interrogate and publish around a range of subjects. Although the Commissions are predominantly led by biomedical scientists and cognate public health professionals, many address social science questions and involve social science expertise. Medical anthropologist David Napier was lead author of the Lancet Commission on Culture and Health (2014), for example, and all commissions on global health (https://www.thelancet.com/global-health/commissions) address questions of social structure, everyday life, the social determinants of health, and global inequalities.

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This article introduces the feminist praxis of duoethnography as a way to examine the COVID era. As a group of diverse, junior, midcareer, and senior feminist scholars, we developed a methodology to critically reflect on our positions in our institutions and social worlds. As a method, duoethnography emphasizes the dialogical intimacy that can form through anthropological work. While autoethnography draws on individual daily lives to make sense of sociopolitical dynamics, duoethnography emphasizes the relational character of research across people and practices. Taking the relational aspects of knowledge production seriously, we conceptualized this praxis as a transformative method for facilitating radical empathy, mobilizing our collective voice, and merging together our partial truths. As collective authors, interviewers, and interlocutors of this article, the anonymity of duoethnography allows us to vocalize details of the experience of living through COVID‐19 that we could not have safely spoken about publicly or on our own.

This paper presents a case study of food relations between female employers and nonindigenous domestic workers in the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. The paper argues that food and eating are still powerful racial and class markers among people in Mexico regardless of their ethnic adscription. The paper describes the history of food relations in Mexico and illustrates the parallels between ideas of culinary and human mestizaje as imagined founders of Mexico's national identity. In doing so, it identifies the complexities of addressing racism among a group of women workers that, in theory, are imagined as mixed while, in practice, are part of an occupation that has been and is still heavily racialised.Recent literature on paid domestic work has mainly focused on globalisation, female immigration and discrimination based on gender, race, class and citizenship (

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Theories of reflexive modernization are still at the centre of a heated debate regarding the possibilities of social transformation through agency and the reflexive capacity of individuals to work on themselves through the construction of their own biographies and certainties. However, when it comes to identifying reflexivity in the lived experiences of individuals, the issue becomes more complex since this enterprise greatly depends on the way people engage with narratives of the self. This article explores reflexivity and processes of individualization in the lived experiences of paid domestic workers and women employers in Mexico. The article also analyses the way academic work has identified reflexivity among workers. Even though the term 'reflexivity' has not specifically being used, studies have often demonstrated the way domestic workers reflexively engage with processes of individualization. The article argues that there are important methodological challenges when it comes to identifying reflexivity through narratives of the self. The context of an interview, the subjectivities of the researcher and participants' own subject position might all be factors that enable or obstruct the production of those narratives and therefore have an effect on the visibility of processes of individualization in the lived experiences of individuals.