Dirt, foreignness, and surveillance: The shifting relations of domestic work in Pakistan

Abstract

This article uses the site of a residential community within a gated university complex to examine a new urban wage model of domestic labor in Punjab, Pakistan. In a socio-historical context where employer–employee relations have traditionally been shaped by asymmetric reciprocal relations and kinship bonds based on class, caste, and gender hierarchies, the rise of a depersonalized wage system exposes women domestic workers to new insecurities and vulnerabilities. The findings from this ethnographic study show how notions of dirt and foreignness are employed symbolically and militarized surveillance employed in concrete terms to control worker bodies and enforce the wage model. This is enabled by spatial segregation between the intimate, feminized residential space and the private masculinized outer space encircling it within the walled complex. The women workers are, thus, caught between pre-capitalist forms of coercion and a market-based wage model. The study broadens existing scholarship on domestic work by examining domestic labor arrangements through the lens of a place-specific shifting of social and economic relations.