Figure of the Domestic Worker in “Maid in Heaven”: Study of Digital Untouchability in Contemporary Media

While academic work has been conducted on the representation of domestic workers in traditional media, very little work has been done on the depiction of domestic work in digital popular culture that emerged since the 2010s. To examine this, we conduct a close reading of the ongoing YouTube series Maid in Heaven (2017), a comedy about two seemingly benign employers and a cunning domestic worker. This representation highlights the deep-rooted anxieties around diminishing feudal control over workers because of postliberalization urban restructuring and its effects on households controlled by working, upper-caste youth. Within the series, we are broadly interested in four themes: (a) humor; (b) feudal maternalism in the urban neoliberal context; (c) spatiality, untouchability, and domestic work; and (d) online othering. In examining the same, this study provides insights into how caste- and class-based segregations are reproduced within digital popular culture.