Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the maintenance and care work in the family sphere carried out by women in the textile sector based on a frame from the movie “Estou me guardando para quando o carnaval chegar” (I'm preserving myself for when carnival arrives). The precariousness of the work in the Polo Têxtil de Pernambuco is inserted into the house domain and into the different types of care with the family that maintains the possibility of life and social reproduction but is made invisible, as the recent literature on the subject emphasizes. To discuss women’s work, the analysis of the image uses the visual anthropology approach and the American theory of cultural patterns in dialogue with data from recent works. It deals with topics such as social representations, gender, home, and work spaces to contribute to the debate on the overload of women’s activities that are not considered work.