In her essay, ”House and home” Iris Marion Young (2005) calls for a feminist re-appraisal of the home, highlighting the ambivalence that the private sphere has rendered (not the least) in feminist tradition. Drawing on Heidegger´s thoughts on living as constituted by building and preservation (where the former has been coded masculine and the latter feminine), Young wants to investigate the critical values of the domestic through practices of preservation. Her project seeks to upgrade the work that has been marked as reproductive, emphasizing the creativity in sorting, arranging, preserving and taking care of things around us. More specifically, she emphasizes the human value of practices aiming at guarding “the things of the past and keep them in store” (s 141).
In this paper, I follow Young´s call, analysing people´s experiences of everyday cleaning. Through ethnographic data primarily based on interviews I investigate the historically imbedded meanings tied to practices of tidying up. However, and unlike Young, I will specifically focus on the least creative aspects of cleaning – the ones usually considered to be instrumental, insignificant and utterly boring. While sorting and organizing are experienced as important and sometimes even rewarding, few people find vacuum cleaning, sweeping the floor and scrubbing the toilet as self-fulfilling. Why do these practices have such a bad reputation – in everyday life, in work, in popular culture and, not the least, in the feminist movement?
Drawing on theories of queer temporality, I highlight what I want to call the temporality of cleaning – the repetitiveness and direction backwards and sideways instead of forward – as a possible answer. The circular practice of removing and taking care of our physical remains reminds us of our approaching death, rather than of progress, and thus generates feelings of anger and despair. But instead of ignoring or avoiding this reminder of another time, I suggest a feminist appraisal of the temporality of cleaning. A feminist politics that puts cleaning at the center rather than in the margins would acknowledge our mutual dependency and co-living with the material world around us.

Fanny Ambjörnsson is a Social Anthropologist and Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University. Her research interests include queer theory, youth studies, intersectionality and queer temporality. In her latest book, “Tid att städa. Om vardagsstädningens politik och praktik” (Ordfront 2018), she focuses on the temporality of the gender-coded everyday practice of cleaning.

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My ambition is to propose for another direction of feminist politics, based on theories on queer temporality and the ethics of care. I find these thoughts highly relevant for the conference, and I hope it will fit into one of the panels (although I do not exactly see in which one)!