“There was much that went unspoken”: maintaining racial hierarchies in South African paid domestic labour through the unsaid

ABSTRACT

Domestic labour in South Africa has historically been a site of racial inequality which has continued into the post-apartheid era despite extensive transformation efforts. This article argues that silence presents an avenue for understanding how such racial hierarchy has persisted. We present a qualitative case study of a domestic labour dyad utilising the diary-interview method to analyse the presentation of labour troubles and the perceptions, interpretations, and implications of the unsaid regarding such troubles. Drawing from the data, we demonstrate how intimacy is foregrounded in talk, while domestic labour activities and domestic labour itself go unsaid. We conclude that the intimate nature of domestic labour allows participants to speak about their relationship in ways that make the labour relationship and its racial inequalities become invisible in talk, making it a difficult institution to challenge and change.

KEYWORDS:

• Paid domestic labour
• silence
• racial hierarchy
• intimacy
• diary-interview method
• post-apartheid South Africa

Acknowledgements

The support of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development towards this research/activity is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the CoE in Human Development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Amy Jo Murray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2438-3507

Kevin Durrheim http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2926-5953