One fine summer evening, when I was writing this chapter, a friend and I were walking by a farm. My friend held her breath to avoid the ‘stink’, while I thought the smell fitted in with the place and season. But, I see slime as dirt, whereas my husband sees it as just a bit of mucus. But, he sees my hair scattered on the bathroom floor as dirt, and I see it as just hair …

Introduction

While an instinctive revulsion to dirt related to a fear of infection or ill-health occurs throughout the animal kingdom, the human biological reaction is shaped by the social, in the form of ‘experience and culture’ (Curtis, 2007:660; Douglas, 1966/2002). Within that evolving social, ‘menial’ historically meant ‘related to the household’ more generally (Albin, 2012:234; Merriam-Webster), but now it commonly connotes drudgery, making the performance of manual housework, particularly cleaning, a site of power. But once outsourced, these ‘menial’ jobs become ‘dirty’ work, by being infused with symbolic ideas of polluting matter and constructing those doing the work as people ‘out of place’, out of the democratic social ‘order’ (Cox, 2016; Douglas, 1966/2002). Disgust for dirt, then, is in part invoked by anxiety among the privileged of attrition of class boundaries (van Dongen, 2001). However, relying too much on higher-level explanations and theoretical conceptualisations of dirty work risks trivialising the material realities of working with real, physical dirt. Wolkowitz argues:

At the same time, an epistemological assumption that everyone understands dirt and the associated disgust in a similar way needs to be avoided (van der Geest, 2002; also Longhurst, 2000:90). In a 2017 ethnographic study of street cleaning and refuse collection in the UK, the participant-researchers ‘squeamishly’ put on gloves before setting to work. The workers, however, often did not wear (the cumbersome) protective gear, as it slowed them down: