Who works, who sits: Embodied ethnography and the everyday organization of domestic inequality

This paper examines how ordinarily taken-for-granted forms of domestic inequality become ethnographically perceptible. Drawing on year-long ethnographic fieldwork on domestic labor in Karachi, including interviews and sustained participant observation across multiple households, it follows movement through entryways, kitchens, lounges, and routines of service to examine how employers, workers, and the researcher came to inhabit the same household differently. Rather than treating the researcher’s body as a neutral instrument, the paper approaches moments of hesitation, awkwardness, ease, and embarrassment as ethnographic entry points into the arrangements of domestic life. By tracing movement between differently positioned ways of inhabiting the same household, I show how moments of mismatch made naturalized arrangements perceptible, revealing how unequal possibilities for movement, rest, anticipation, and service were distributed through everyday domestic routines.