Clothing matters: locating wash, wear, and care

Abstract Clothes and laundry are simultaneously profoundly personal and political. In this article, we illustrate how our book, Wash, Wear and Care: Clothing and Laundry in Long-Term Residential Care, applies feminist political economy to reveal the importance to workers, residents, families, and volunteers of the invisible and undervalued work involved in clothes and laundry. In the process, we illuminate how effective feminist political economy theory and methods can be in exposing the personal as political and in linking the global to the national as well as to the very local and indeed intimate in these days of the international power of capital.