Affective configurations and embodied power relations in platform-mediated cleaning of private homes

Considering violence as a mundane element of social interaction is an unpleasant yet essential challenge. Attending to its normalization across digital and physical spaces, this paper examines how affective relationships between cleaners and clients in platform-mediated domestic labor are shaped by intersectional power hierarchies and how these relations prefigure encounters that can be dismissive, invasive, or even violent. Drawing on interviews with domestic cleaners and clients in Vienna, Austria, we focus on the private sphere of the home as a mundane site of digitally mediated encounter. While this type of encounter is often associated with convenience and stress relief for clients and income for workers, it also entails the risk of disrespect, microaggressions, and even physical or sexual violence. To analyze mundane digital violence in platform-mediated labor, we bring together feminist political economy approaches to platform labor, focusing on broader societal structures of exploitation, with micropolitical perspectives on affective relations unfolding between cleaners and clients, both in digital interactions and in their initial embodied encounters within the private space of the home. Focusing on these affective relations enables us to address mundane violence as exemplified experiences of the (ongoing) devaluation of domestic work within embodied platform capitalism.