HOUSEMAIDS AND THE HAPTIC CODE DURING COVID TIMES

This chapter focuses on the dominantly gendered house-help in India: the cooks, cleaners, and maids during the pandemic-triggered lockdowns in Delhi and its metropolitan areas. Even if we are scared to enter people's homes, we have to come out to work to sustain our lives. The case studies of these three women point to the precarity and 'unrepresentability' which turn the previously invisible figure of the maid to a new extreme: that of a suspect body, a source of contagion, whose very touch is questionable. Albeit Jaaware focuses on the phenomenology of touch and brings it outside the boundaries of caste studies, and even beyond India, his investigation of the codes of sociality is important to emphasize the structure that touch works on, enabling a value that is good or bad in different contexts. The experiences of the three women around Delhi’s extended metropolitan spaces point to the discourse of what Francoise Kral calls “social invisibility”.