Epilogue: Ongoing Conversions

The epilogue reprises the major themes of the book, namely, how South Asian migrant domestic workers’ everyday conversions in Kuwait mark the confluence of affective labor, Islamic ethical practice, and discourses of South Asian women’s malleability—all of which reshape their subjectivities, affinities, and belongings. By briefly revisiting the situations of some of my interlocutors, the epilogue underscores the ongoing nature of their everyday conversions, and the fluid forms of subjectivity and affinity they are developing—forms of everyday conversion that are incipient and tenuous, but significant. The epilogue also discusses the importance of storytelling as a flexible means of conveying domestic experiences without stabilizing, foreclosing, or overgeneralizing their meanings and significance. Stories are a supple form that index and illustrate the layered, multidimensional, and irrepressibly expansive nature of the everyday.