Care and Political Strategies: Servitude and Services
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Spanish movement Las Kellys, initiated by hotel housekeepers back in 2014, is a paradigm for the redefinition of salaried work as a whole. In an era when labor is being redefined as a feminine and feminized issue, Las Kellys fights against two sources of stigmatization: female domesticity and feminized externalization. This paper analyzes the threads of servitude, its continuities, and, through the struggle of the hotel housekeepers, its ruptures. It presents their strategy of political struggle, which has been divided into seven points, and its social and political consequences, concluding that the emergence of Las Kellys (the women who clean) as a political entity entails a re-politicization of the concept of care from a feminist perspective. Our exposition of this exemplary case study allows us to single out some analytical elements in order to spur debate on the feminist articulation of production and reproduction today.
Source: Danish Yearbook of Philosophy
Author: Yolanda Martínez Suárez
Institution: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4408465958