ABSTRACT
This chapter attends to the contradictory representation of cleanliness and filth in urban captivity narratives. Some texts situate the male captor as slovenly and repulsive, holding their captive(s) in a dilapidated house amidst trash and bodily fluids. Other texts describe the captor as obsessed with personal hygiene, depilation, and orderliness. Both figurations rely on vague social norms: what counts as too clean to too dirty? This chapter argues that through these descriptions, female captives mobilize the links between cleanliness and citizenship to inscribe the binaries dirty/clean, American/Other, and safe/threatening onto the body of her captor. Victims thus locate themselves on the positive side of these binaries as ideal citizens, particularly when their subjectivity as either poor and/or racialized excluded them from this realm. Ultimately, these descriptions underscore contradictory nature of our social preoccupation with filth and cleanliness: to be too dirty signals a threat to domestic norms and social ideals, situating the captor outside of middle-class American respectability. However, to be too clean is symptomatic of the very pathology that is illustrated by dirt: mental illness, sexual perversion, and a threat to American citizenship and belonging.
