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This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning practices they carry out in their own households. Following contemporary research, it understands domestic labour as a site of production and negotiation of classed, gendered and ‘raced’ subject positions. Scholars researching on paid domestic labour have emphasised cleaning labour as devalued; however, this article argues that the unpaid cleaning labour the women carry out in their own households might become a source of self-worth. It does so by briefly depicting how the twentieth-century Chilean modernisation and processes of class formation were coupled with an emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness. It also provides an ethnographic description of working-class women’s cleaning practices, attending to the classed and gendered meanings and value the women attach to these practices, and discussing their negotiation of expected standards in relation to material conditions and the multiple demands and values of everyday life. It shows that the margin of negotiation is much reduced when the results of cleaning practices are more open to public view. It also argues that the women not only express their subjectivities through everyday negotiations of cleaning standards, but also produce particular modes of being working-class women.

This article explores the workings of social and territorial stigma among residents of an stigmatized neighborhood in Santiago de Chile in the context of nationwide conflict. By attending to the narratives of social organizers, it shows how stigma framed the narratives of the Chilean revolt of October 2019 produced by two female organizers older than fifty years without tertiary education. It argues that, for those with less educational and political resources, stigma can help think through a social conflict by translating broader political issues into everyday life experiences and can both constrain and enable different forms of engagement in the revolt. The narratives were obtained by ethnographic interviews carried out in a broader project of the unfolding of the unrest in Santiago’s peripheries between November 2019 and July 2020.

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