ABSTRACT

In hospitals, cleaning is considered an important element of hygiene, but at the same time it is a financially, as well as socially, marginalised area of work. Drawing on the results of an ethnography on cleaning work and discourses on hygiene in German hospitals, the chapter explores how people who deal with various kinds of dirt in hospitals are constantly negotiating their position within the hospital hierarchy. Yet this constant negotiation itself can be considered a kind of labour that people must do while doing their job. Since it involves sensations, emotions and affects, it can be analysed as ‘affective labour’. How do the varying tasks of removing dirt in a hospital shape and (re)inforce powerful social relations between people? How is, for example, the dominant construct of ‘the female migrant cleaner’ being reproduced on a daily level – with all of its gendered, racialised and class-related implications? And how do people who work on cleanliness gain agency even in difficult working conditions? The chapter proposes the implications of hospital hygiene as a gateway for the renegotiation of power relations and agency – that hygiene discourses can be used by cleaning personnel to fight for better working conditions, as well as to reposition them within the hospital. However, when looking at agency as a concept and a means of analysing social situations, it bears some ambivalence. An analysis that focuses on individual agency is always in danger of disregarding structural power relations and the effects of socio-economic inequalities. Hence agency is to be examined in all of its conditions and conflicting effects: For instance, an empowering or resisting act can concurrently result in a strengthening of power dynamics or in reproducing powerful differentiations and ascriptions. Thus the chapter provides a complex analysis of the efforts and costs connected to working (affectively) on agency in the context of cleaning work.