About this talk:

A legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil is home to the largest number of African descendants outside Africa and the greatest number of domestic workers in the world. Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic research, the author examines the lives of marginalized informal domestic workers who are called "adopted daughters" but who live in slave-like conditions in the homes of their adoptive families. She traces a nuanced and, at times, disturbing account of how adopted daughters, who are trapped in a system of racial, gender, and class oppression, live with the coexistence of extreme forms of exploitation and seemingly loving familial interactions and affective relation- ships. Highlighting the humanity of her respondents, Hordge-Freeman examines how filhas de criação (raised daughters) navigate the realities of their structural constraints and in the context of pervasive norms of morality, gratitude, and kinship. In all, the author clarifies the link between contemporary and colonial forms of exploitation, while high- lighting the resistance and agency of informal domestic workers.

Friend Center, Room 101

About the speaker:

Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Interim
Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Recruitment, Retention, and Engagement at the
University of South Florida. She authored The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma,
and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families (2015, U.T. Press), a book that received
three awards from prominent organizations, including the Society for the Study of
Symbolic Interactionism and the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Sections on
Emotions and Body and Embodiment. The Color of Love is the topic of her 2015 TEDx
talk and has been translated into Portuguese. With a Fulbright grant to Brazil and the
ASA’s Funds for the Advancement of the Discipline, Dr. Hordge-Freeman published a
second book in 2022, Second-Class Daughters: Informal Adoptions as Modern Slavery in
Brazil (Cambridge University Press). Additionally, she has published her research widely
and in leading journals, including the Journal of Marriage and Family, Ethnic and Racial
Studies, Qualitative Research, among others. In 2016, she co-edited the book titled Race
and the Politics of Knowledge Production: Diaspora and Black Transnational
Scholarship in the USA and Brazil (Palgrave). Dr. Hordge-Freeman teaches courses on
Racial & Ethnic Studies, Comparative Racial Stratification, Sociology of Families, and
Race, Gender, and Labor in Brazil/Latin America. Her community-engaged teaching,
including creating the USF in Bahia, Brazil program, has been recognized through
regional, state, and national awards. In 2020, Dr. Hordge-Freeman led the development
of the Anti-Racism Initiative at the University of South Florida as part of her role as the
inaugural Senior Advisor to the President and Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and
later as Interim Vice President of Institutional Equity. Most recently, she and her
husband, McArthur Freeman, launched an interdisciplinary collaboration on Instagram
entitled, Imagine Blackness A.I., which brings together artificial intelligence, art, and
sociology to produce images inspired by speculative fiction and Afro-Futurism. She
received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A./Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke
University.