Invisibilitas Perempuan Pekerja dalam Le Quai de Ouistreham Karya Florence Aubenas: Analisis Symbolic Annihilation dan Interseksionalitas

Abstract

Florence Aubenas’s Le Quai de Ouistreham represents women cleaning workers as indispensable to modern service systems while denying them equal social recognition. This study examines how women workers’ invisibility is constructed through Gaye Tuchman’s concept of symbolic annihilation and an intersectional feminist perspective. Employing a qualitative descriptive method in literary studies, the research purposively selected narratives, dialogues, and descriptions through close reading. The data were coded into three categories: omission, trivialization, and condemnation, then analyzed in relation to gender, class, age, qualifications, mobility, and employment status. The findings show that omission occurs when workers’ greetings and physical presence receive no social response and when they are expected to efface themselves before passengers. Trivialization operates through the naturalization of sanitation work as exclusively feminine and supposedly unskilled. Condemnation emerges through explicit evaluative language that classifies the narrator as among the ‘unqualified’ and channels her toward low-status cleaning work. These representational mechanisms operate within material and institutional conditions shaped by age, limited qualifications, lack of transportation, long commutes, multiple jobs, and fixed-term contracts (CDD). The study concludes that symbolic annihilation is intertwined with precarious labor: women’s work remains materially indispensable while the workers’ voices, value, and social recognition are systematically diminished.