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.
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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