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Paper short abstract

This paper examines everyday violence in Karachi's domestic labor through workers' and employers' moral vocabularies. It shows how care and ethical obligation become sites where harm unfolds slowly, producing exhaustion, moral confusion, and precarity within intimate labor relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how everyday violence unfolds through moral economies of care in middle-class households employing domestic workers in Karachi, Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women domestic workers and their employers, I trace how relations framed through care and moral obligation simultaneously sustain households while producing slow forms of exhaustion, neglect, and harm.

Rather than appearing as rupture or overt abuse, violence emerges through ordinary expectations: demands that ignore workers’ hardships, moral judgments attached to lateness, food deemed “good enough” only after it has lost its value for the household, house rules that exclude workers’ children while demanding emotional loyalty, and moments where care quietly recedes. In these relationships, workers are held accountable to ethical expectations without secure forms of recognition or support.

Workers articulate these experiences not primarily as economic exploitation but as moral failures. Drawing on idioms such as ehsaas (compassionate awareness), lihaaz (consideration), and izzat (respect), they name moments where relational obligations are breached, revealing how violence folds into care itself. Employers, meanwhile, situate these relationships within moral frameworks of decency and middle-class respectability. As moral managers of the household, women employers understand domestic order as an ethical achievement, mobilizing ideals of care, responsibility, and proper womanhood to justify asymmetries while obscuring the depletion of those who sustain their households.

Everyday violence thus takes shape as a rhythm of endurance, where maintenance, obligation, and fatigue are unevenly distributed. This paper contributes to debates on everyday violence by showing how harm operates through care and ethical expectation.