Suspension

This chapter examines how South Asian domestic workers’ experiences of migration in the Gulf are characterized by “suspension”—of their being a part of, yet apart from, their “work households” in the Gulf and their “family households” in South Asia. This chapter discusses how domestic workers’ experiences of suspension are produced through a number of macro- and microlevel socioeconomic processes that tether workers to household spaces. These migrant women are subject to a number of everyday forms of interrelation, disciplining, and governance that produce and consolidate their role as dual agents of reproduction. As the chapter further explores, these processes also engender everyday conversions marked by emergent forms of affinities and belongings that are not reducible to the binary logic of inclusion/exclusion, or to familial or ethnonational forms.