Interventions to assist domestic workers, as a category of 'disadvantaged' persons, draw on ideas of who and what domestic workers are. The most common model is that of under-educated, working class, ethnic minority women who speak in a discredited register that indexes their low status, and of whom the interveners often have first-hand knowledge, because members of this group work in the interveners' homes. These interventions addressed at such, or similar models of domestic workers have included organized provision of literacy and language classes, skills and performance training of various kinds, dress and comportment input, trade union recruitment and support efforts, national legislation, as well as transnational human rights advocacy and declarations. Regardless of the scale of intervention, however, they all struggle to make the differences they would like, as if they were aiming at indeterminate targets in an unpredictable environment.
I develop an account here, with regard to persons identifying as domestic workers, of the dynamics through which borders and boundaries between categories of persons and practices are produced, become stabilized and get destabilized. I pay particular attention to what gets left out or becomes hidden in such bordering practices but does not go away, and sometimes returns or erupts in these constructions and policings of categories and borders. Language has a role in all of this, but a contextualized one that needs a further revisiting to the idea of language and the place of language, where the attention is to languaging as material-discursive practices, and to bordering and performance. I work here with posthumanist and southern theoretical resources, and most particularly with Karen Barad's new materialist and posthumanist orientation to socio-material practices (Barad 2003, 2007, 2010). I focus specifically on her attention to relationality, complementarity, boundaries and exclusions in socialnatural activity and what such attention means for a focus on material-discursive practices.
The foci of attention here include domestic work in the Middle East under the kafala system of employment; shifts in race- and gender-marking of domestic work in early decades of the 20th century in colonial South Africa; and a contemporary case study, describing a conflictual encounter between a Black female domestic worker and her employer's White male partner that resulted in the woman leaving her career in domestic work and the man going to jail.
