Uncomfortable stains: Cleaning labour, class positioning and moral worth among working-class Chilean women

Abstract

This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning practices they carry out in their own households. Following contemporary research, it understands domestic labour as a site of production and negotiation of classed, gendered and ‘raced’ subject positions. Scholars researching on paid domestic labour have emphasised cleaning labour as devalued; however, this article argues that the unpaid cleaning labour the women carry out in their own households might become a source of self-worth. It does so by briefly depicting how the twentieth-century Chilean modernisation and processes of class formation were coupled with an emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness. It also provides an ethnographic description of working-class women’s cleaning practices, attending to the classed and gendered meanings and value the women attach to these practices, and discussing their negotiation of expected standards in relation to material conditions and the multiple demands and values of everyday life. It shows that the margin of negotiation is much reduced when the results of cleaning practices are more open to public view. It also argues that the women not only express their subjectivities through everyday negotiations of cleaning standards, but also produce particular modes of being working-class women.

Narrating the Chilean Social Revolt through and against Stigma: The Case of Two Older Women from a Stigmatized Neighborhood

“…Through collective organization, often under the guidance of political parties, the pobladores carved out a space in the city, building their own homes and communities and articulating their needs by calling on the state to guarantee them their rights, thus enacting a dignified life (Murphy 2015; Pérez 2018). In doing so, the pobladores also countered the long-standing, pervasive stigma that categorized them, for being poor, as morally deviant (Cofré Schmeisser 2015) and unclean (Álvarez-López 2019). Through grassroots organizations mainly composed of (though rarely led by) women, the pobladores gained state recognition as legitimate citizens (Murphy 2015) and members of the working class (Álvarez-López 2021), thus securing that which was promised by the compromise state.…”