Maid in India: Negotiating and Contesting the Boundaries of Domestic Work

Building on qualitative, unstructured interviews with domestic workers, this article seeks to illuminate the complexity of the specific strategies and negotiations adopted by domestic workers as they contest and challenge the sociocultural markers of hierarchical difference that their employers mobilize as they try to create boundaries and distinctions between themselves and their employees. To understand the dynamics of this boundary work, we apply concepts and insights from James Scott’s work on everyday resistance and hidden transcripts. We argue that while paid domestic work within the home is a social relation of extreme inequality characterized by fundamental domination and dependency between domestic workers and their employers, domestic workers deploy creative and innovative strategies to contest practices and ideologies of inequality and distinction put forth by their employers. In doing so, they provide a contestation, albeit partial and negotiated, of how social boundaries are used by employers to maintain difference and distinction from the workers.