When cleaning makes you unclean
Being a cleaner, you start to think a lot about dirt.
I think about where in my client’s houses they allow me to clean. Usually, people don't ask me to change their sheets. The bed seems like it's been selected as a private space, even when I'm two meters away, pulling hair clogs out of the ensuite drain. Another trend I've noticed is that most people don’t clean the toilet before I arrive, but they’ll usually empty the bathroom bin, so I don't have to see what's inside.
Which dirt is more taboo then? Shit or menstrual blood? What do we choose to hide? Which part of our life and our bodies carries the most shame?
Where do you clean in your house, if someone's coming over?
British anthropologist Mary Douglas popularised the saying, "dirt is matter out of place." In her 1966 book "Purity and Danger" she argues that dirt is a social category, not a scientific one. Things become dirt when they are no longer of use to us. An example familiar to all of us is hair on the head being beautiful, but that same hair on the shower wall being disgusting. It’s been discarded. It’s in the wrong place.
What categories of people fit this description? Who do we think of as being discarded, misplaced, polluted?
Queers, immigrants, people of colour, sex workers, the disabled. Filthy degenerates. Unwashed masses. Dirty whores. Hoarders.
We're re-entering a global political phase where ideas about purity, dirt and cleanliness are increasingly being used to refer to categories of people. Trump in October 2024 caused a mild ruckus when he called Whoopi Goldberg "dirty, filthy [and] disgusting". In a 2023 speech he described "communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs" as "vermin". At time of writing, within the last 24 hours he spoke of wanting Gaza to be "cleaned out".
Post-pandemic, the language of pollution is used by politicians and the media to stir up one of our basest and most useful, universal emotions: disgust.
I still feel disgust at work, but not as much as you'd think. I understand the physical reality of contamination: germ theory, the sanitising action of surfactants, and the importance of PPE. The social reality is different. Maybe it’s easy for me to do the dirty work of cleaning because I already fill so many categories my society sees as wasteful and unclean.
In John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972), Drag Queen Divine said “filth are my politics, filth is my life”. Okay, okay, I haven't seen it: I only know this because I'm a connoisseur of gifs. But the more I clean, I'm starting to understand her. I'm already so close to the dirt and the filth - and the dirt clings to me.