Giulia Garofalo Geymonat

Giulia Garofalo Geymonat is a sociologist in the field of gender and sexuality and works at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her main areas of expertise are reproductive and intimate labour, migration/trafficking and disabilities. She has extensive experience of researching social movements in relation to sex work and domestic work.

Among her publications: Global domestic workers: intersectional inequalities and struggles for rights (2021 with Sabrina Marchetti and Daniela Cherubini), Disability Rights Meet Sex Workers’ Rights: the Making of Sexual Assistance in Europe (2019), Feminist engagements with sex work: imported polarisations and a «feminist alliance» model in jeopardy (2019 with Giulia Selmi), Sex Workers Speak Who Listens? (2016 with PG Macioti).

Syndicalisation : luttes des travailleuses domestiques dans le monde

> 11 h 15

While the valorization of domestic work has often been at the centre of feminist analyses and claims, when domestic work becomes a paid activity troubles arise. Feminist organizations rarely engage directly in struggles for domestic workers’ rights, and domestic workers’ groups are often reluctant to define themselves as feminist. Through the study of domestic workers’ rights movements across nine countries, with a focus on the decade 2008-2018 and the ratification of ILO Convention 189, our research (Marchetti, Cherubini, Garofalo Geymonat, 2021) sheds light on some of the complexities of the relationship between these movements and feminist movements. Despite the fact that in many contexts there has been a disconnection between the two movements at the practical level, we found that domestic workers’ rights activists often seem to build their arguments on the same anti-capitalist interpretative frames used by feminist groups. Yet, remarkably, they expand them through an intersectional analysis so as to include racialized, lower-class, migrant and other minority groups, in ways which feminist movements have rarely accomplished.