Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, with Sociology of Gender (Fem Sem) of the Department of Sociology, the IRIS NRC, and African Studies.
This talk is based on Curington’s book project with Rutgers University Press, Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal, where she uses ethnographic field methods to center and privilege the experiences of African descendant women care service workers in Portugal that are from the Cape Verde islands. Through a presentation of Cape Verdean cleaning workers’ experiences at work, she interrogates what it means to be both Cape Verdean and Portuguese and how this distinction gets incorporated and produced through racialized and gendered labor market mechanisms. She argues that gendered racialization is linked to the performance of “dirty work” in Portugal, a context where race is not considered a legitimate social category by the state, yet one that remains deeply entrenched in racial and gender hierarchies.
Celeste Curington is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. Her research focus includes Race, Racism and Racial Ideologies, Intersectional Theory, Interracial Intimacy & Multiracial Identification, Gender & Migration, Caring Labor. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA. She presented her paper, “We speak Back!”: Disrupting Belonging and Challenging Anti-Blackness in Portugal” at the Association of Black Sociologists in Philadelphia August in 2018. With Jennifer Hickes Lundquist and Ken-Hou Lin she has co-authored the forthcoming book, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2021.
This lecture is a part of the FemSem brownbag series. FemSem meets Thursdays from 12:30 – 2:00p virtually on the Canvas page for Fall 2020. FemSem is open to all. New students are encouraged to get involved early. For more information, email Kelsey Wright at kwright22@wisc.edu or any of the graduate students or faculty.