Gender, Class and Race: Intersectionality and the Mutual Constitution of Social Relations

Why does essential care so often become poorly paid work? Helena Hirata approaches this question through a dispute within feminist theory: how should we understand gender, class and race as inseparable relations of power? Her 2014 paper moves between Black feminist intersectionality, French research on the sexual division of labor, and comparative eldercare fieldwork. Its value lies in making conceptual disagreement answerable to working conditions.

Relations that produce one another

Hirata traces intersectionality to Black feminist critiques of a feminism centered on white, middle-class, heterosexual women. She places it alongside Danièle Kergoat’s concept of consubstantiality: social relations are mutually constituted through practices, rather than independent categories that occasionally meet. Class relations are already gendered and racialized; gender relations operate differently through employment, wealth and migration.

The distinction matters when analysis becomes a checklist of identities. Knowing that someone is a woman, a migrant and a low-paid worker does not yet explain who controls her contract, how her work is valued, or whose freedom depends on it. Hirata’s account of situated knowledge also challenges an undifferentiated “women’s perspective”: women may occupy sharply unequal positions within the same labor arrangement. These arguments develop in the Portuguese original.

The paper presents a real disagreement, not two interchangeable slogans. Kergoat emphasizes gender, class and race as fundamental relations; broader formulations of intersectionality also include sexuality, age, religion and disability. Hirata asks whether expanding categories can obscure material domination. That concern is a useful challenge to superficial classification, but it does not establish that other relations lack explanatory force. Readers can examine what each framework makes visible in a particular situation.

Who becomes a care worker?

Hirata’s Brazil–France–Japan research, conducted in 2010–2011, supplies the argument’s concrete test. She distinguishes internal migration in Brazilian care work from international migration in the French sites, and discusses men entering Japanese care employment through unemployment and economic crisis. Different routes into the occupation coexist with low recognition and precarious professional trajectories.

An account of racist treatment in a French public care institution makes the hierarchy tangible: workers can provide intimate assistance while being treated as outsiders who do not belong. Care involves material, technical and emotional work, yet that combination does not guarantee either respect or bargaining power. Hirata relates its devaluation to the history of women’s unpaid household labor and discusses how the marginalization of care recipients and providers can reinforce one another.

For feminist reading, this shifts attention from celebrating women’s capacity to care toward the arrangements that assign care unequally. The field examples illuminate mechanisms; they are not population estimates for three entire countries or a description of their present-day workforces.

From a concept to a reading path

Read Crenshaw’s 1989 legal argument for the problem of discrimination disappearing when race and sex are assessed separately. Then turn to IBGE’s Brazilian gender indicators for differences within the category “women,” and AWID’s domestic-worker rights argument for the importance of workers’ own organizing. Together they connect analytical categories, measurable inequality and the power to change working conditions.

The DOI printed by the publisher, 10.1590/S0103-20702014000100005, does not currently resolve through doi.org. The article is available on the journal’s SciELO page.