Female clerks and dirty work? An ethnography on the influence of gender and race in the functional organization of clerks of the domestic and family violence court in São Paulo

• Grant number: 21/08888-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date until: June 01, 2022
• End date until: May 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Maria da Gloria Bonelli
• Grantee: Tharuell Lima Kahwage
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Judiciary servers are a group composed mostly of white women, who have taken office in such positions more frequently than men, according to data from the National Council of Justice (CNJ, 2019). They are responsible for practices essential to the functioning of the justice system, performing administrative and routine activities such as procedural handling, serving the public, and drafting legal documents. Despite their centrality for the Judiciary, studies on this group are still incipient, especially if compared to the production around the magistrature, an activity with greater deference and notoriety in contrast to the servers, who tend to accumulate activities of less autonomy - the so-called dirty work. In this dynamic, magistrates pass on to the employees the activities that they do not want/need to monopolize, pointing to a sense of work that is devalued and mobilized in a relational manner. Our hypothesis is that, even though they occupy desirable intermediary public positions, the servers perform the dirty work delegated by the judges, leading them to re-signify these meanings and dispute them, with the objective of resisting this devaluation. The cutout of a domestic violence court seeks to emphasize that the competence itself fits into the concept of dirty work, since it involves regular contact of the servers with stigmatized groups (women in situations of violence). Considering the gender and race composition of the servers, our objective is to understand the functional organization and the distribution of this work among the servers in the clerk's office of a domestic violence court in the state of São Paulo. This is an empirical research, with a qualitative approach, in which we will use as data collection techniques semi-structured interviews with the court clerks and ethnography, generating ethnographic data that will be submitted to further analysis. (AU)