Precarious geographies of status: digital territoriality and domestic work in Brazil

This article introduces the concept of precarious geographies of status to examine how domestic workers in Brazil, rebranded as “personal cleaners”, navigate spatial stigma and discrimination through social media. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this paper shows how Instagram functions as a hybrid moral and territorial infrastructure, enabling workers to symbolically detach from peripheral neighbourhoods while remaining materially embedded in precarious urban geographies. By curating aspirational digital selves, these women perform professional legitimacy and moral worth, engaging in continuous reputational labour shaped by social media visibility and Instagram logics. The article situates this dynamic within postcolonial urban histories of racialised space, professions, and territorial stigma, showing how social media reconfigure the politics of status, belonging, and exclusion in the Global South. The concept of precarious geographies of status demonstrates how symbolic mobility is achieved through social media performance, yet remains contingent, fragile, and ultimately limited to enduring material inequalities, contributing to debates on spatial stigma, digital territoriality, and the moral politics of urban space in political geography.