Domestic workers as political subjects: desire, political subjectivation and everyday lives of Islamabad's domestic workers

Amirali, Alia (2024) Domestic workers as political subjects: desire, political subjectivation and everyday lives of Islamabad's domestic workers. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

In mainstream discourses, there is virtually no conceptualisation of domestic workers or working-class women as political subjects. Moving beyond work/non-work binaries and challenging the equation of ‘political subjects’ with only those directly participating in collective, public mobilisations, this thesis conceptualises Islamabad’s women domestic workers as a group of subaltern political subjects who are invisibilised as workers, as women, as citizens, as city residents, and as political subjects in the realms of scholarship, policy, and organised politics in Pakistan and beyond. In doing so, it underscores the need for a serious accounting of the political subjectivities of these subjects as these often escape political radars and are thus rendered invisible in scholarship as well as political practice. Most of Islamabad’s domestic workers are part-time/live-out workers, low-caste working-class women living in Islamabad’s impoverished bastis (informal settlements) and working in the kothis (bungalows) of the city’s elite. Using ethnographic methods, this thesis tracks the conceptual vocabularies used by these domestic workers to describe and critique their everyday experiences in the kothi, in the basti and in their familial/intimate lives, giving an account of how they understand, navigate, and resist the multiple, co-constitutive forms of class, caste/religious, and gender domination experienced by them in the everyday, including the everyday threat of forced eviction from the bastis they live in. An understanding of these subaltern political subjects, this thesis argues, requires recognising them as desiring subjects who not only think and act but also feel and want. By documenting the critical vocabularies, practices, and political imaginaries of Pakistani domestic workers, an under-researched and multiply-marginalised group, this study contributes to the empirical and conceptual scholarship on the political subjectivities of subaltern groups in the global South. It revives a focus on Pakistan’s subordinate classes, highlights the importance of studying the ‘infra-political’ under politically and socially repressive conditions, and demonstrates that these gendered subalterns are active producers of structural critique who have quite different subjectivities from their male counterparts. In doing so, it hopes to expand the field of vision and action of the Pakistani Left and help forge new, more expansive, and robust working-class solidarities.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Alia Amirali
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Sets:	Departments > Gender Studies
Supervisor:	Madhok, Sumi
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4698

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