In Brazil, domestic work represents one of the largest employment sectors, engaging nearly six million women who, as Françoise Vergès poignantly notes, “open up the world” every morning. Across South America, there are between 11 and 18 million of them. This essential work is met with profound exploitation and extremely low pay. Yet, for over a century, literature has treated them with a staggering silence, representing them only through flat or highly stereotyped lenses. In this lecture, Brazilian scholar and journalist Dr. Mariana Filgueiras explores a profound contemporary “symbolic rupture”. Driven by social mobility and educational quota policies for the last decade, domestic workers are transitioning from being mere objects of someone else’s narrative to becoming the active subjects of their own writing. Spanning literature, cinema, and visual arts, this presentation offers a fresh, intersectional look at aesthetic emancipation and the Care Economy in the Global South.