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Paper short abstract

This paper examines irregularised Brazilian migrant women in informal domestic work in Lisbon, showing how migration regimes and labour precarity limit unionisation while fostering alternative forms of resistance and solidarity through care-based networks and everyday survival strategies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the labour experiences of irregularised Brazilian migrant women employed in informal domestic work in Lisbon, analysing how contemporary polarizations around migration, citizenship, and care reconfigure labour conditions and possibilities for resistance. It argues that restrictive migration regimes, combined with racialised and gendered labour hierarchies, produce forms of precaritization characterised by informality, bureaucratic violence, and systematic exclusion from labour rights and protections.

Based on critical ethnographic research drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and life histories, the paper explores how domestic workers navigate and respond to these conditions in contexts where formal labour organising and unionisation are largely inaccessible. Rather than treating informality solely as a space of vulnerability, the analysis foregrounds the everyday practices through which workers enact alternative forms of resistance and solidarity, including mutual aid networks, care-based relations, informal knowledge-sharing, and collective strategies of survival.

The paper is grounded in feminist theories of social reproduction, racial capitalism, and critical anthropology of migration, positioning reproductive labour as a central yet persistently devalued dimension of contemporary economies. By situating informal domestic work at the intersection of migration governance, labour precaritization, and gendered regimes of care, the paper contributes to debates in the anthropology of labour on how resistance and solidarity are reconfigured under conditions of legal exclusion and political polarisation. It suggests that in settings where institutionalised labour organising is constrained or ineffective, workers reimagine solidarity through relational and care-centred practices that unsettle conventional boundaries between work, politics, and social reproduction.