GENDER, LAW AND WORK: NA APPROCH SINCE THE ZONE OF NON-BEING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A METHODOLOGY IN ORDER TO EFFECTIVATE HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract

The research “Street sellers: an overview of work conditions’ of men and women in Rio de Janeiro’s downtown” published by Metropoles’ Observatory (2019) collected and compiled significant information on work conditions’ of male and female street sellers who work in that region. By registering workers’ claims and their reports of state violence, becomes noticeable that the oppression imposed by the Public Power has as discursive grounds the “order assurance”. The mentioned research helps to reflect upon the relations between gender, law and work from the concrete reality of men and women who work as street sellers in Rio de Janeiro. This article assumes that our model of legal subject, able of acquiring full juridical protection, instead of abstract and universal, has concrete characteristics which determine a standard of humanity which is white, male, cisgender, heterosexual and with no disabilities. Also, I comprehend the reality analyzed in this article while immersed in a matrix of power engendered by coloniality and composed by at least the following systems of social hierarchies’ organization: racism, capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy deeply imbricated. Interrelations among these systems allocate subjects in different and various positionalities inside the matrix of power, complexifying Fanon’s zone of being and zone of non being. Repositioning our approach on the relation between gender, law and work from the zone of non being refuses the simplified thought that reduces aggressions against bodies in such zone to “anomalies” or “distortions” in the application of the law. It consists in realizing that the rule in the zone of non being is the absence of juridical protection since the law is designed and implemented in order to secure the ways of being and living and the privileges of the zone of being.