Invisible in homes, visible in cities: visibility and dis/empowerment in paid domestic work in London

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research on the experience of Slovak au pairs living and working in the London area. It attempts to connect three areas: theories related to visibility and social recognition, debates on cities as public places enabling political action, and paid domestic work. Focusing on a specific group of migrant domestic workers, I analyze how various aspects of being visible or invisible relate to the empowerment, disempowerment, and resistance of paid domestic workers. I demonstrate that host families invisibilize au pairs and their work in order to both diminish their role in children’s lives and secure the myth of the exclusivity of the nuclear family. Au pairs counter this process of invisibilization by making themselves visible in their rooms and in the city. I interpret au pairs’ usage of visibility and invisibility as enabling au pairs subtle gestures of resistance without openly challenging the inequalities of the au pair scheme.

Keywords:

• Au pair
• city
• home
• paid domestic work
• resistance
• visibility

Acknowledgments

This paper is result of my work at the Institute for Sociology of Slovak Academy of Sciences. It has been supported by the grant VEGA 2/0152/19 ‚Work then and now: Institutional, organizational and interactional conditions of occupational accomplishment‘. I am thankful to the members of Center for Cultural Sociology of Migration at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University for commenting on earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zuzana Sekeráková Búriková

Zuzana Sekeráková Búriková is social anthropologist. She works as researcher at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include paid care and domestic work, material culture and consumption. She did ethnographic research on experience of Slovak au pairs in the UK and study of paid care and domestic work in Slovakia. Together with Daniel Miller she published the book Au pair (Polity 2010), she wrote the book Panie k deťom a na upratovanie (Munipress 2017) on paid domestic work in Slovakia.