Women who host: An intersectional critique of rentier capitalism on AirBnB

Abstract

Scholarship on AirBnB has often brought critical focus to the advancement of rentier capitalism and gentrification through the sharing economy. In this article we draw upon in‐depth interviews with women in London who host their shared living space on AirBnB, to present meaningful empirical examples of women utilizing the platform as a way of surviving. Often, women in our research turned to AirBnB after facing exclusion from traditional labor markets, based on gender, age and/or disability. Others relied on AirBnB to meet their own housing needs, for instance: subletting their own bed to meet rent payments. Rather than departing from a critical class analysis, we instead hope to nuance understandings of rentierism on AirBnB by focusing on these women as complex intersectional subjects of capitalism. While many hosts fall clearly into the category of rentier capitalists, making money through property ownership, the lived realities of hosting were often more complex. We therefore use these women's lived experiences to complicate understandings of class subjectivity in the “sharing economy”, drawing upon an intersectional perspective to showcase women who are hosting in order to subsist.