If only we *could* clean away the instabilities of our times...
I honestly wish it were possible
I am beginning to see the outlines of a theme: influencers who focus on domestic labor practices traditionally associated with women. On Monday, I wrote about tradwives, and today I’m sharing pieces about influencers in the cleaning and organizing realms.
“Mrs Hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework: Scouring away the crisis?”
I finally made my way to this paper about cleanfluencing1 from The Sociological Review that I mentioned last week. It’s written by Emma Casey (of Northumbria University Newcastle) and Jo Littler (of City, University of London)2 and is a fantastic, thrilling read. I’m planning to write something longer engaging with this paper, but for now, I wanted to share one section that stuck out to me about the societal forces that converge to make cleanfluencing attractive to both the influencer and those who engage with the content.
An important part of the pleasure of cleanliness and the homemade is the ways in which they represent love, care and familial wellbeing as part of a “moral obligation” to the family. From this perspective, the “self”, femininity, personal value and the affirmation of others are reflected in the home and family and in particular in the display of objects in the home. Rather than just being a “job” to be done, domestic labour thus becomes part of who you are; a “craft” in cleanliness and shine with “fetishistic qualities” although with…one consequence being “neurosis”, obsession and constant housework.
Cleanfluencing not only reifies domestic labour, it takes those negative consequences and weaves them into the brand.
‘It’s a control thing’: why are we so fascinated by super-organised homes?
This piece by Amelia Tait for the Guardian focuses on the obsession with organization in contemporary influencer culture. A pantry filled with snacks isn’t good enough, or so the organizing influencers—adjacent to cleanfluencers—believe, so they decant the snacks into jars with calligraphied labels. Flour from bags into bins, pasta from boxes into canisters. You get the idea.
Hsin-Hsuan Meg Lee is a marketing professor at ESCP Business School in London who has researched the relationship between Marie Kondo-style decluttering and happiness. Lee says many people see decluttering their spaces as akin to decluttering their minds. “There’s a concept called symbolic pollution,” she says. “In the context of household organisation, this term refers to items that are out of place and violate the rules we set for our surroundings…For some, the process of removing this pollution and putting things in order causes them to feel they are in control.”
This quotation makes me think of Casey and Littler’s thesis, that cleanfluencing “recasts cleaning as therapy to ‘clean away’ some of the instabilities, difficulties and threats of contemporary neoliberal culture.” Simply replace the word clean with organize. As Tait points out in her piece, organization can function as metaconsumption, aka “consuming objects that act in service of other objects.” Rather than buying less or getting rid of possessions, Tait writes, “the solution to overconsumption has become yet another form of consumption.”
As I delve deeper into the realm of influencers whose content centers around unpaid domestic labor, I can’t help but think of the brands who benefit from this work. I mean the cleaning and organizing products, not the people brands who shill for them. More on that, soon.
If you’re not familiar with the term, cleanfluencing describes when an influencer’s content centers around cleaning and other domestic labor related to housework. Though not exclusively, cleanfluencers tend to be women.
I left the British spellings and other grammatical notations in the quotations because the paper is published in a UK journal.