From “queen of the home” to “warrior woman”: the new “woman” in the legal discourse of “flexibility” and the uberization of work in real estate brokerages

Abstract

This article examines how the legal discourse on women’s labor in Brazil—particularly in its contemporary neoliberal form of flexibility and deregulation—has produced a new gendered subjectivity: the so-called “warrior woman.” Building upon a previous study on the “queen of the home” stereotype during the Vargas era, it investigates how Law, understood as a gender technology, constructs female subjects through normative discourses that reconcile economic inclusion with the persistence of traditional roles of care. The paper argues that, under the neoliberal rhetoric of autonomy and diversity, legal discourse transforms women’s emancipation into a mechanism of self-management of precarity. Methodologically grounded in Foucault’s framework and Carol Smart’s concept of law as a gender technology, the analysis draws on Ludmila Abílio’s notion of uberization and Nancy Fraser’s critique of the neoliberal co-optation of feminism. The empirical focus on QuintoAndar’s real-estate brokers illustrates how platform labor reconfigures the female workforce: the promise of flexibility conceals new forms of subordination and reproduces the historical ideal of the maternal and self-sacrificing woman under updated discursive terms.