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Paper short abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with women domestic workers in Delhi to examine domestic labour as contemporary manual work. It argues that capitalism relies not only on bodily exhaustion but on the management of workers’ visible appearance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines women’s paid domestic work in Delhi as a category of manual labour. Challenging accounts that frame manual labour as residual to technologically mediated futures of work, it argues that domestic labour remains constitutive of contemporary capitalism through the management, exhaustion, and valuation of working bodies. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi’s peripheral settlements and middle-class neighbourhoods, the paper centres women’s understandings of "mehnat" as hard, repetitive labour as both bodily effort and cumulative bodily depletion.

At the same time, domestic workers are required to manage how their labouring bodies appear. Employers’ diffuse expectations that workers be “clean” and “presentable” translate into everyday practices of appearance work. These practices are shaped by spatial and social proximities between workers’ homes and employers’ homes, producing distinct regimes of bodily control and visibility across neighbourhoods.

By bringing together analyses of bodily wear, appearance, and value, the paper recentres manual labour as neither past nor disappearing, but as an embodied process through which respectability and inequality are continuously produced.