Borderwork: ‘Illegality’, un-bounded labour and the lives of Basotho migrant domestic workers

Abstract

This thesis provides an in-depth, ethnographic case study of women who have migrated from Lesotho to work as domestic workers in South Africa. It explores and analyses these women’s experiences of migration and employment, while examining the impacts of the Lesotho-South Africa border on their lives. The border is conceptualised in this thesis not merely as a territorial frontier but as an apparatus operating throughout a constellation of social and geographical sites. This apparatus is seen to produce migrant subjectivities. In the case of Basotho migrant domestic workers, it produces and disciplines them as ‘illegal’ migrant workers. These women..