Affective configurations and embodied power relations in platform-mediated cleaning of private homes
Abstract:
Viewing violence as a commonplace element of social interaction is an unpleasant yet essential challenge. By examining its normalisation across digital and physical spaces, this paper explores how affective relationships between cleaners and clients in platform-mediated domestic labour are shaped by intersectional power hierarchies, and how these relationships set the stage for encounters that can be dismissive, invasive or even violent. Drawing on interviews with domestic cleaners and clients in Vienna, Austria, we focus on the private sphere of the home as an everyday site of digitally mediated encounters. Whilst this type of encounter is often associated with convenience and stress relief for clients and income for workers, it also entails the risk of disrespect, microaggressions, and even physical or sexual violence. To analyse mundane digital violence in platform-mediated labour, we combine feminist political economy approaches to platform labour – focusing on broader societal structures of exploitation – with micropolitical perspectives on the affective relations unfolding between cleaners and clients, both in digital interactions and in their initial embodied encounters within the private space of the home. Focusing on these affective relations enables us to address mundane violence as exemplified experiences of the (ongoing) devaluation of domestic work within embodied platform capitalism.
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