Becoming Respectable: Material, Symbolic and Emotional Aspects of Hospital Cleaning Work

Abstract

This essay explores the working experiences of twenty-four women cleaners in two public hospitals in Athens, Greece. The participants are Albanian and ethnic Greek Albanian. It focuses on the intersectionalities of gender, ethnicity and class, drawing from ethnographic research during the period 2017–2018 in two hospital sites, which included interviews and observations with women migrant workers. The essay is structured around two key research questions: how both groups of migrant women cleaners experienced material, emotional and symbolic aspects of cleaning at the hospital, mobilising their gendered and ethnicised bodies at work; and how both groups narrated their experiences of their embodied gendered, ethnicised and classed selves, on individual as well as collective levels, to give meaning, to create a process of valuation and to construct formations of respectability. I reveal how the process of cleaning is caught between material, symbolic, emotional and embodied aspects, with migrant women cleaners forming ways of feeling respectable.