Being Dignified: Understanding Socio-Spatial Exploitation and Agency in Nepali Domestic Work

The global labour movement for paid domestic work asserts that domestic work is ‘work’ and domestic workers are ‘workers.’ In Nepal and across South Asia, however, contemporary domestic work continues within quasi-feudalistic and patronage-based systems, entrenched in various forms of unfreedom and unevenly evolving toward the formalised waged work envisioned by the International Labour Organization’s Decent Work agenda. Falling outside orthodox and Western notions of capitalist work, the experiences and conditions of Nepali domestic workers have remained both physically and conceptually ‘hidden’ to the global and national labour movement, and to the wider field of employment studies. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with 20 domestic workers, this thesis situates domestic work within Marxist-feminist geographies of variegated capitalism. I join feminist researchers in considering forms of capitalist exploitation beyond the wage relation, arguing that broader forms of social and spatial exploitation are key to including Nepali domestic workers' experiences in labour and employment studies, and labour organising more generally. Three empirical chapters align with distinct yet intersecting domains of exploitation beyond the wage relation. I first examine the roles women occupy between workplace and family relationships, as mothers, daughters, wives, and employees, examining intimacy and relationality as forms of labour control which resemble patronage-based and feudalistic modes of production. Second, I explore the spatio-temporal rhythms of domestic work in Hetauda, including seasonal, menstrual, festival and unseen time, showing how overlapping temporalities beyond clock time produce the experience of time pressure, with embodied constraints. Third, the thesis examines how women navigate in-kind wages as a subsidy or replacement of the cash wage, pursuing forms of socio-economic advancement through multiple non-monetary capitals and proximity to middle class employers. By theorizing domestic work as a form of variegated capitalist labour, and explicating forms of relational, temporal and in-kind wage exploitation within capitalist relations of production, this thesis advances the conceptual boundaries of both ‘paid domestic work’ and ‘capitalist work’ in Nepal. This thesis also contributes to an understanding of women’s agency and aspiration within conditions of work, and the extent to which domestic workers can negotiate better lives for themselves and their families.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Mueller, Grace

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Vira, Bhaskar
• Barford, Anna

• Nepal
• domestic work
• variegated capitalism
• exploitation
• qualitative methods
• Marxist-feminst

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8a4daa6a-975d-4057-94ac-8db2435ce0cf/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.124139

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/394043