Caring for others, taking care of water: gender and race in the production of the city

Abstract

This article discusses the importance of water in the daily lives of women living in favelas and squatter settlements in the city of Rio de Janeiro, articulating the debates on urban infrastructure and careful thinking about the gendered and racialized ways of making cities. Through small domestic events, dialogues between the authors and their interlocutors, and more extensive ethnographic descriptions, the article shows how water bears the power of the ordinary and is one of the objects that allow us to see the potency and vulnerability of daily life in terms of gender, class, and race. It describes women’s work in the processes of city-making by relating the precarious access to water with the subordination of care as coexisting aspects that make visible the conditions of profound inequality of the residents of peripheries.