Maintaining the Status Quo through Repressed Silences: The Case of Paid Domestic Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

As competent social actors, we individually and collectively leave things unsaid that might threaten to disrupt the status quo. In this article, we outline an understanding of the unsaid and extend its implications to include what we call ‘repressed silences’ or silences about which we do not speak. Drawing on a diary-interview study involving five domestic labour dyads comprised of a white employer and a black worker, we examine silences topicalised by participants, how the unsaid stands in contrast to what could/should have been said and finally how these silences constitute a form of repressed silences. We demonstrate how the topic of paid domestic labour and its labour-related roles, rights and responsibilities are silenced – and the silence itself is not spoken of – among participants, thereby (re)producing the status quo of South Africa’s (racialised) inequalities and hierarchies.

“I hardly see the husband”: Noticing the absence of men in paid domestic labour research

“…In addition, relations between employers and workers (especially in former colonial contexts) often include remnants of the master–servant relationship (Hansen, 1990; King, 2007; Stoler, 2002). Paid domestic labour is often constructed as a site of class and racial antagonisms that are resisted, negotiated, and managed between women in the home (Archer, 2011; Murray & Durrheim, 2019, 2021).…”