Two observations spurred the research that informs this book: the invisibility of domestic workers, which in my personal experience was exemplified in India, and a feminist/class-related or moral disproval of outsourcing domestic work, in particular housecleaning, among some British people. The feminist perspective argues that outsourcing housework contributes to the stalling of the domestic gender revolution and conflicts with the notion of universal sisterhood. I have known British feminists who outsourced cleaning, as I myself have done, or who had been cleaners previously. Some academic feminists who were outsourcing cleaning felt guilty about it, while others were reticent. It was clearly a contested topic for conversation, even though I often heard harried female colleagues exclaiming ‘I need a wife!’ The disjuncture between theory and these real lives concerned me.

From my diasporic location, investigating the conditions of paid domestic work in two cultural contexts seemed a way to resolve some of the persisting gaps in its theorisation, guided by two research questions:

• • In the UK and India, how do White British and Indian women who provide cleaning services and White British and Indian academic women who use these services (and have an interest in feminism/ gender sensitisation), respectively, conceptualise cleaning work?

• • How does paid-for domestic cleaning fit into current understandings of work and ‘paid’ work?

The experiences and meanings of work shared so generously by the domestic workers I met as part of the research process in both India and the UK, alongside service-users’ experiences of outsourcing, not only changed my perceptions of the occupation, but also confirmed that the conditions of work are crucial to how it is experienced. This introductory chapter provides my interpretations of the key terms and the italicisation that I have used in the book and an overview of its structure. But first, who is ‘I’?

The ‘I’ in this book

I was born in – and lived in – India for 28 years. For the past 25 years, I have lived in the UK. In my diasporic space I am constantly reminded that we are not born with but into a ‘culture’. My diasporic identity and experiences may not mirror those of other diasporic researchers, because of differences in positionalities in diasporic and non-diasporic spaces, for example being a first- or later-generation diasporic person (Henry, 2007).