Feeling clean: Language materiality and the discursive production of value in hotel ‘laundry routes’

This article examines the discursive production and transformation of value through the oft-overlooked practice of hotel laundry work. In tracing the object biographies of luxury linen items, my goal is to surface work/ers ordinarily obscured and/or disregarded. The analysis is grounded in discourse-ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two five-star hotels and one commercial laundry in Hong Kong. Specifically, I consider how laundry is handled, evaluated, and talked about across three timespaces: (i) documentary regimes and frozen actions in hotel rooms; (ii) silent work and human-machine interactions in laundry plants; and (iii) the dis/assembling and re/valuing of ‘condemned’ linen. In each timespace, discourses of cleanliness/dirt and concomitant registers of value emerge. Following Graber (2023), I also pay special attention to sensory or ‘qualic’ evaluations. These ‘laundry routes’, I argue, expose how language and material practice intersect to structure broader value regimes and specifically, ideologies of cleanliness within economies of leisure/luxury consumption. (Language materiality, value discourse, luxury labour, object biographies, discard studies)