Micro(bial) management: everyday cleanliness and the divisive power of hygienic worries

Abstract

At a major research institution in the American South, cleanliness norms are intensifying for students, housekeepers, and institutional administrators. Whether individual practice, waged labor, or institutional policy concern, daily hygiene routines often refer to invisible or otherwise absent threats to health. Broadly construed as ‘germs’, these include flu, norovirus, and Escherichia coli, as well as dirt, dust mites, allergens, and mold. Their mobilization influences students’ and housekeepers’ interpersonal relations in a range of common university spaces, revealing connections among disease, embodiment, risk, and care. At the same time, concern with germs aligns with institutional efforts to control a historically powerful cadre of workers. Connections between students’ experiences of health and disease risk and housekeeper and institutional orientation to those risks are obscure, although fundamentally constitutive of each other. Analysis of their different, but intersecting ideas about microbial hygienic risk draws together critical geographies of social reproductive labor, cultural geographies of more-than-human agency, and a recent call to elaborate a political ecology of health. Ethnographic and archival data reveal how germs retrench institutional disparities, placing the (re)production of student cleanliness practices and the working lives of housekeepers in tension. For students, germs help shore up valorized subject positions, informing regimes of self-care. For department administrators, a new employee management regime made the potential of microbial threats to student health a scientific instrument of labor control. For housekeepers, germs are particularly evocative of the demand to care for student health by managing exposure to microbial disease risk. Exploring different mobilizations of germs reveals the importance of more-than-human life to systems of and divisions between social reproductive labor regimes on campus.