Creating 'safe' spaces through exclusionary boundaries: Examining employers' treatment of domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

This article examines how middle-class employers in India deployed boundary mechanisms to marginalize paid domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly after the resumption of domestic work post-lockdown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with employers and Resident Welfare Association (RWA) members, the study reveals that pre-existing symbolic boundaries—rooted in class, caste, and notions of purity—intensified into social boundaries through physical restrictions, surveillance technologies, and regulative practices within gated communities and households. RWAs emerged as significant actors enforcing visible, stable physical boundaries (e.g., entry checks, documentation, and app-based monitoring), while employers enacted more permeable regulative boundaries through sanitization rituals and spatial segregation, legitimized by discourses of care and distrust. These boundary processes reinforced class-based inequalities, normalized differential treatment, and underscored the persistence of social hierarchies despite middle-class claims of egalitarianism, highlighting the pandemic's role in exacerbating domestic workers' precarity and exclusion.