Bernardino-Costa, Joaze2024-04-232024-04-232021-07https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14135/1021This research is a social and critical analysis of the longstanding history of Black women's culinary work in Brazil. The kitchen and the work carried out in this space are thought of as tools for understanding the hierarchies of Brazilian society, based on the life stories of Black women working as cooks. This thesis investigates, from the 18th century to the present day, the historical, economic, and political processes that resulted in the naturalization of the presence of Black women in this space, reflected in the popular Brazilian expression a foot in the kitchen and the stereotype of the Brazilian black mammy: the mãe preta. Thus, I expose the relations of power and violence that are established in the kitchen between Black women workers and white masters, and later, bosses, in addition to the essential character of a work that allows the accumulation of capital and the maintenance of middle and high-class lifestyles that keep Black cooks working under exhausting, precarious, and miserably paid conditions. Considering the longevity of this institution, I also analyze how the mechanisms of Black women’s exclusion from the labor market and the existence of a professional racial etiquette, in which they must fit, continue to be maintained through a focus on gastronomy and the reports of Black women working as chefs today. However, considering their confinement to the kitchen, it is a fundamental part of this work to reflect on this place as a site of Black women's geography, which allows for broadening the definitions of agency and resistance based on their experiences. Thus, I analyze their culinary work as a resource for social and political action, considering how they dare to define themselves despite it and also from it, and the different ways in which they use this work to build and maintain family and community ties in the Black population. Furthermore, I discuss how Black women cooks are forced to be insightful analysts of the context in which they live for the sake of their survival and their loved ones and, in this sense, how they act strategically and produce critical social perceptions that highlight the racialized, gendered, and class structures that found the Brazilian society. To analyze these issues, I build a critical social history of Black women's work in the kitchen from broader historical processes and individual trajectories, based on a diversity of biographical records and interviews with contemporary Black cooks and chefs. The socio-historical analysis of the work is based on contributions from the field of black feminist epistemology, the historiography of Black women’s agency, and the field of critical food studies.Documento textualporAcesso abertoRacismoGêneroMulher e TrabalhoAbordagem SociológicaSexismoTese120922