‘I don’t clean up after myself’: epistemic ignorance,responsibility and the politics of the outsourcing of domestic cleaning

Responsiveness, affect and responsibility

In this article, I am following in the footsteps of feminist care ethicists (Tronto, 1993; Kittay, 1999), and in particular I ground my argument in relational accounts of the self (Nedelsky, 2011), and relational conceptualisations of responsibility (Young, 2006; Tronto, 2012). ‘Relational responsibilities’, for Joan Tronto, ‘grow out of relationships and their complex intertwining’ (2012: 303). Tronto argues that ‘[s]ome form of relation – either presence, biological, historical, or institutional ties, or some other form of “interaction” – exists in order to create a relation and, thus, a responsibility’ (2012: 306). In my development of the term ‘responsibility’, I emphasise that it is in our being responsive to the inextricably intertwined interdependencies within which we are situated that responsibility emerges. In other words: responsibility should be understood not in Kantian terms as obedience to some higher abstract ideal, but instead it involves our everyday responsiveness to our interconnectedness. This implies, in turn, that being ignorant or non-responsive towards our relationships is an assault on the social bonds that sustain us, and renders impossible the practice of responsibility, as I conceive it.

When Bawaka Country et al. (2013) discuss the relational cosmology of Yolŋu in North East Arnhem Land (northern Australia), they highlight ‘the importance of being aware and attentive’ for Yolŋu, ‘as well as the underlying ethical imperative of responsibility and obligation’ (2013: 185). This conceptual framing sounds close to my own model. Yet, the relational ontology on which I can build as a white migrant to Australia is different from the co-becoming between Yolŋu country and humans that Bawaka Country et al. (2013) describe. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2013) highlights the commonalities between the Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory she conceptualises, and its Western counterpart, and importantly discusses the central differences between the two. While both recognise partiality and subjectivity and bring together the body and knowledge production (Moreton-Robinson, 2013: 333), an Aboriginal approach – in contrast to the Western feminist tradition – is not predicated on a body/earth split but emphasises connection. According to Moreton-Robinson, the ‘ontological relationship occurs through the inter-substantiation of ancestral beings, humans and country; it is a form of embodiment based on blood line to country’ (2013: 341). It is this interconnectedness that is the basis of Aboriginal sovereignty which informs Indigenous women’s standpoint. It makes accessible a societal location that Sandra Harding (1993) calls ‘strong objectivity’, providing a ‘unique vantage point based on [Aboriginal women’s] experiences of colonisation and [their] different way of being human’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2013: 342). I do not have access to this kind of strong objectivity.

My account of responsiveness is informed by relational feminist ethics and Western standpoint theory; responsiveness, to me, is a corporeal practice of opening up towards other human and nonhuman beings. Becoming responsive involves more than our intellectual faculties: our whole bodies are involved. Affects – in their quality as bodily sensations that go beyond the individual self – importantly shape responsiveness, and structure the space in the ‘in-between’ of responsiveness and responsibility. In my use of the concept of affect, I follow Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s (2010, 2014a, 2014b) relational model. Gutiérrez Rodríguez argues that ‘affect is not just an individually interiorized sensation but the sensorial incorporation of the social’ (2010: 130). She investigates reproductive labour as ‘affective labour’ that is importantly shaped by colonial legacies. Drawing on Aníbal Quijano’s work, Gutiérrez Rodríguez assesses that the ‘logic of subjection inherent in the establishment of a racially coded system still reverberates in the construction of the nation’s Other in Western Europe, although it does not always explicitly operate in racial terms’ (2014b: 49). Against this backdrop, she emphasises that affects ‘evolve within a concrete historical and geopolitical context’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010: 5), and carry ‘residues of meaning. They are haunted by past intensities, not always spelled out and conceived in the present’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010: 5), and can disturb but also stretch and reaffirm power relations. In this way, colonial legacies and global inequalities ‘are felt on an individual level and mobilised in our everyday encounters’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010: 3). Affects, responsiveness and everyday practices of responsibility and ‘privileged irresponsibility’ (Tronto, 1993: 120–121) are thus importantly interrelated, and closely connected to past and present, and to local and global relations of power and inequality, namely of race and coloniality and also gender.

Epistemic ignorance of domestic work and domestic workers

Both the men and women in the outsourcing households I conducted my research with are knowers situated at specific epistemic locations; they are also privileged in many ways. The literature on epistemic ignorance is helpful to expose the structural hindrances that stand in the way of transformation towards justice within the realm of reproductive work. It helps to highlight non-accidental ‘incompetencies’ to perceive certain inequalities in the context of outsourcing.

Ignorance can be an accidental by-product of the limited resources humans have to understand their world. But that is not the only kind of ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007: 1). Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana argue that sometimes what we do not know is not a mere error, but to the contrary something purposefully crafted. ‘Especially in the case of racial oppression, a lack of knowledge or an unlearning of something previously known often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation’ (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007: 1). The production and maintenance of this latter kind of ignorance – as a specific form of knowledge – is what I want to highlight in my discussion of outsourcing.

Linda Martín Alcoff (2007) identifies three types of epistemologies of ignorance in the work of Lorraine Code, Sandra Harding and Charles Mills that are relevant in regard to our understanding of ‘the intersection between cognitive norms, structural privilege, and situated identities’ (2007: 39). According to Code, knowers are not interchangeable and thus ‘not all “epistemically equal”’ (Alcoff, 2007: 42), in regard to a specific epistemic objective. Ignorance, therefore, ‘should be understood as contextual’ (Alcoff, 2007: 43). In a similar vein, Dotson talks about ‘situated ignorance’, as an ‘unknowing’ that ‘follows from one’s social position and/or epistemic location with respect to some domain of knowledge’ (2011: 248).

Interpreting Harding’s claim, pertaining to the correlation between group identity and epistemic dispositions, Alcoff writes, ‘on balance, members of oppressed groups have fewer reasons to fool themselves about this being the best of all possible worlds, and have strong motivations to gain a clear-eyed assessment of their society’ (2007: 44; emphasis in original). Because men are located differently in relation to socially constructed gender identities and gender politics that will correlate with differing experiences, men (especially if their gender identity intersects with a higher class status, whiteness and heterosexuality) will tend to have a different, partly inhibited perspective on domestic work, including the matters of outsourcing. Men – just as women – are not, however, a homogenous group, but experience gender at their respective locations interacting with the axes of class, race, sexuality, etc, which will also impact on the complex web of ‘cognitive tendencies’ (Mills, 2007: 23) of the epistemic terrain. This is not to say that men cannot be committed to gender equality and develop feminist politics. They are, however, through their location within a heteronormative, sexist gender order, epistemically disadvantaged in certain respects. And – in analogous ways to women – men have to tackle these obstacles from their particular social position in order to actively work at undermining heterosexist patriarchy, which includes assessing their practices within the household.

Mills’ account of oppressive systems focuses ‘not on generally differentiated experiences and interests, but on the specific knowing practices inculcated in a socially dominant group’ (Alcoff, 2007: 47; emphasis in original). Here, ignorance is not understood as a lack ‘but as a substantive epistemic practice that differentiates the dominant group’ (Alcoff, 2007: 47). Alcoff is clear that the problem is ‘not in the identity per se’ but ‘in the cognitive norm’ (2007: 50). This is important. I too argue for a structural critique that challenges a notion of hegemonic masculinity that is dominating (heteronormative, homo-, bi- and transphobic and patriarchal). Critiquing (and transforming) narrow and damaging ideals of masculinity shall serve to make visible marginalised alternatives, or caring masculinities (see Hanlon, 2012; Elliott, 2016).

What have men got to do with it?

The body of scholarship engaging with ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild, 2002) that emerged over the past decades importantly highlighted the interactions of gender with class, race, ethnicity and citizenship status (Anderson, 2000; Parreñas, 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Haidinger, 2013). Most of this work focuses on the differently situated women bound together through outsourcing, and leaves as an afterthought those with whom ‘the “care drain” truly begins’, as Hochschild (2002: 29) puts it. This almost exclusive focus on differently situated women, in a way, reproduces reproductive work as a ‘women’s issue’. There are some noteworthy exceptions of authors who engage more directly with men as workers and as employers in the IDRL (see Sarti and Scrinzi, 2010; Cox, 2013; Kilkey et al., 2013; Gallo and Scrinzi, 2016). It is in this niche that I conducted an in-depth study with opposite-sex couples outsourcing domestic cleaning to migrant workers in the informal market in Austria. The particular focus of my multi-stage research was on the men within the outsourcing households. Andrew Gorman-Murray points to the legitimacy of studying ‘mainstream’ masculine homebodies, ² suggesting that they are important exactly because of their apparent ‘normalcy’, ‘their quotidian setting, their adherence to certain facets of hegemony, and thus their role in constituting and reconfiguring the contemporary gender order’ (2013: 143). The men in my sample, who are all cis, white, non-disabled, middle-class and living in opposite-sex partnerships, can be understood as embodying ‘normalcy’ as such. Though over-represented in many settings, men in this structurally powerful position are under-researched when it comes to scholarship on the outsourcing of domestic and care work from private homes.

The empirical vignettes I offer in this article stem from a small study that I conducted in Vienna between May and October 2014 with ten cis, white, middle-class men and women in their early thirties to mid-forties, who live together with opposite-sex partners and outsource parts of their reproductive work. My focus was on the outsourcing households, and I did not interview the migrant workers (all of whom were women) who performed domestic cleaning for these households in the informal market. ³ The research comprised four stages: (1) I interviewed each participant individually, (2) I went on joint ‘home-tours’ with the participants, in which they led me through their homes explaining who uses the space doing what, and (3) I followed up by interviewing the couples together. (4) The last phase was so-called ‘go-alongs’ (Kusenbach, 2003; Evans, 2012) with the participating men only; each of the men picked a household chore that they performed, while I ‘went along’ posing questions along the way. The extracts here are taken from individual interviews in stage 1. In the next section, and before I discuss these empirical vignettes, I elaborate permeability in conceptualisations of human skin.

Skin as contact zone

Within the dominant paradigm in the West, skin is usually seen as the border demarcating the individual self as distinct and separate from its environment. Skin bounds the self that is understood to be identical with the physical space of one human body. Jennifer Nedelsky illustrates the dominant model with the following quote: ‘we are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, cited in Nedelsky, 2011: 110). I want to emphasise that although skin does function as a boundary in some ways, it is also in many ways a connecting element. I maintain that skin is both separating and connecting. However, its function in interconnecting tends not to be seen. We take ‘the dominant notion of selfhood … that of the “separative self” … so much for granted that our boundedness seems natural and essential’ (Nedelsky, 2011: 110).

This point is important for my argument as the notion of the bounded self that denies relationality makes responsible practices towards those to whom we are connected more difficult. It is, in fact, common knowledge in the West that our skin is permeable. We know that humans breathe through our skin; that we sweat; that we smell perspiration of strong scents such as alcohol off other people through their skin. Everyday experiences like these are exemplary evidence that we are not sealed off, but more fluid and in contact with ‘the other side’ of our epidermis, connecting through our skin. Thus, we can understand skin as both differentiating individual selves ‘from’ the outside world and ⁴ in many ways connecting us ‘to’ this world. The image of the skin as a membrane makes visible how we are continuous with and affected by our surroundings. Catherine Keller’s image of the skin is very different from the picture of a separating boundary. ‘Our skin does not separate – it connects us to the world through a wondrous network of sensory awareness … Through my senses I go into the world, and the world comes into me’ (Keller, 1986: 234). Contemporary affect theory is in line with this image of skin. Affect theory ‘proposes a notion of the subject that is porous and permeable in various modalities of ecological exposure’ (Zolkos, 2016: 78). Magdalena Zolkos (2016) argues that the permeable subject mobilised in affect theory is part of a critique of the ideology of an autonomous and self-bounded subjectivity, and that it is aimed at undermining the self/other dichotomy dominant in Western philosophy. Zolkos argues for an understanding of this porousness as an ‘example of a counter-logic to discourses of subject autonomy that can, potentially, corrode liberalism’s investment in the idea of the “invulnerable self” in relation to its spiritual and material ecologies’ (2014: 3).

I take cue from the membranous image of skin in affect theory for my notion of ‘semipermeability’. Paraphrasing affect theorist Teresa Brennan’s (2000) argument in Exhausting Modernity, Zolkos maintains that Brennan takes affective transmission as literal, not metaphorical; ‘a penetration of cutaneous surfaces of the body by particles’ (2016: 80; emphasis in original). It ‘is precisely this membranous image of the skin as a subjective boundary that allows for the transmission of certain constituents and for retention of other constituents’, argues Zolkos, ‘that lies at the heart of the socio-biological imaginary of the subject produced within affect theory’ (Zolkos, 2016: 80). For Brennan, the taken-for-grantedness of affective containment ‘is a residual bastion of Eurocentrism in critical thinking’ (2004: 2). Zolkos asserts that ‘the individualist view that “emotions and energies are naturally contained, going no further than the skin,” … denies “the affective impact of the (social and maternal) environment”’ (2016: 79-80, quoting Brennan, 2004; emphasis added). This individualist concept of the self ‘relies on, and produces, strong dichotomies of subject and object, individual and the environment’ (Zolkos, 2016: 80).

These mobilisations of permeability within affect theory elucidate the relationship between affects, or – to be more precise – affective containment with the dominant strands of Western ontology and epistemology (which I am critiquing in my article, supported by alternative ontologies and cosmologies and feminist and social epistemologies). Importantly, the self that is invoked in Brennan and Zolkos is more than relational; it is permeable. It is precisely the denial of its permeability in dominant Western thought that lies at the heart of the emergence of a strong subject/object split. It is in these – dominant – notions that the individual is presumed to be standing apart from its environment, instead of enmeshed with it. In regard to the outsourcing of domestic work, this denial of permeability is a view that does not see the ‘connective tissue’, that is, the relationships between men and women who share domestic spaces, or the quality of the employer-employee relation. Instead, a view that denies permeability focuses on subject positions as distinct and closed off from the webs of interdependence within which they emerge.

Thus, I call attention to an understanding of skin as membrane and medium of connectivity, to focus on relations between the human actors in outsourcing. An outlook that starts from the relations between these people highlights their (unequal) relations of interdependence; that is, such a perspective focuses on their connectedness through semipermeable membranes. I am, above all, interested in understanding the collective patterns of non-responsiveness – and ignorance – that permeate a system, rather than lingering on the individual ‘failures’ of subjects.

Situated knowers in domestic spaces

Social and feminist epistemologists have argued against the notion of the supposedly universal, independent cogniser dominant in mainstream epistemology. They put more emphasis on the relations between knowers, on the specificities of social locations, the implications of group identities and the importance of epistemic communities in the process of cognition. Patricia Hill Collins’ (1991) conceptualisation of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology is of importance here. Maintaining that Black women have access to both an Afrocentric tradition, and to a women’s standpoint, Collins argues that the conceptual orientation of a Black women’s standpoint is grounded in Black women’s experiences of ‘being simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it’ (1991: 207). The alternative epistemology Collins (1991: 219) retraces in Black Feminist Thought challenges the validity of the dominant model. An epistemology of connection in which ‘truth emerges through care’ (Collins, 1991: 217) has four key features. First, experience is a criterion of meaning (Collins, 1991: 208), with value being placed on the epistemological significance of the concrete (Collins, 1991: 209). Second, there is a belief in connectedness and the use of dialogue in accessing knowledge claims (Collins, 1991: 212). Third, an ethic of caring, personal expressiveness, emotions and empathy are central to the knowledge validation process. Finally, personal accountability for knowledge claims is expected (Collins, 1991: 217).

Let me connect these claims to an earlier passage in Black Feminist Thought, where Collins refers to Black women singing the Blues. Drawing on Michele Russell’s analysis, Collins argues that the content of the texts, as well as the form of delivery, make them unique expressions of a Black women’s standpoint, which an Afrocentric feminist epistemology builds on. Collins remarks that ‘[t]he songs themselves were originally sung in small communities, where boundaries distinguishing singer from audience, call from response, and thought from action were fluid and permeable’ (Collins, 1991: 100; emphasis mine). Importantly, this fluidity and permeability does not imply the ‘dissolution’ of individual selves; on the contrary, Collins argues that individual uniqueness flourishes in such a group context – it flourishes in connection (also see Welch, 2013 on Native individual autonomy).

Thus far, I have highlighted how permeability structures human relations; how we socially make sense and conceive of permeability. I have referred to non-dominant approaches in epistemology. In these alternative models, relationality – including affective relations, and emotions – and ethical commitments play an important part in knowledge formation processes. Thus, how we conceive the permeable (as our ontological condition), and how we structure our ‘contact zones’ (including responsiveness), has epistemic consequences. I argue that the unequal distribution of reproductive work leads to a specific pattern of epistemic ignorance, which, in turn, aids the reproduction of unequal power relations (and becomes a breeding ground for further ignorance and irresponsibility). Besides cognitive processes, I perceive embodied practices (also see Dalmiya and Alcoff, 1993) and affective transmission to be relevant for knowledge formation; a knower’s particular lived experience is central to knowledge about domestic work.

Conceptions of human permeability, in tandem with ethical orientations, structure our knowing processes. Consequently, they too structure our individual and collective semipermeable membranes. I am advocating for an ethical orientation that does not build on a (capitalist) narrative of competition buying into a distorted image of isolated individuals; instead, I want to strengthen the counter-narrative that sees the permeable condition of human selves and human communities, and that values the quality of good relations as indispensable for human (and nonhuman) flourishing. The work of care is required to create and uphold these relations.

In the next section, I retrace unjust epistemic patterns in the arena of domestic work, to locate in mundane interactions nodal points where ignorance and irresponsibility are socially produced. This is a necessary step in order to work towards more just relations in the field of reproductive work and its outsourcing.

Outsourcing gendered conflicts

In the acknowledgments of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, Douglas describes what prompted her to engage with dirt – or ‘matter out of place’ (1996: 36) – in context. ‘My other source of inspiration has been my husband. In matters of cleanness his threshold of tolerance is so much lower than my own that he more than anyone else has forced me into taking a stand on the relativity of dirt’ (Douglas, 1996: viii; emphasis mine). What Douglas captures conceptually as the relativity of dirt (with an example that comes from her own domestic arrangements with a male partner) can also be read, I argue, as situated in a broader context of gender politics and gendered responsibilities in domestic settings. In fact, what I want to highlight here is that I found in my informants’ responses evidence that what is being outsourced is not only domestic cleaning itself – but the (potential) conflict that arises out of a different, socialised gendered attentiveness to the material matter of ‘dirt’. Sabine Buchebner-Ferstl and Christiane Rille-Pfeiffer (2008), in their report for the Austrian Institute for Family Studies on the distribution of work within the family, use the same neologism the participants in my sample came up with for the phenomenon – Schmutztoleranz. A passage in MAIZ’s (2004) study, concerned with the distribution of reproductive work within households and its connection to outsourcing, frames the employment of a domestic worker as a strategy of conflict management as well as ‘ransom payments’ (2004: 61; translation from German by the author) to avoid this disliked work.

The consequences of outsourcing domestic work to migrant women are relevant to the politics of gender; as are the root causes of the phenomenon. In my research, I found that what brings households to outsource domestic work are the gendered conflicts around divergent demands and desires regarding cleaning. Importantly, however – and as feminist scholars in this field have shown time and again – the logic at work in this specific kind of outsourcing makes indisputably clear that gender cannot be researched in disconnection from other social categories, as a separate entity. An intersectional analysis of the interaction of gender with race, ethnicity and class is indispensable to make sense of outsourcing. When we realise that what is really being ‘outsourced’ – along with the actual performance of domestic work – is a conflict related to the gender relations within the outsourcing households, an intersectional perspective also brings to light that this is happening within a broader frame of asymmetrical power relations pertinent to race, ethnicity and class in the coloniality of labour (Quijano, 2000; see Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010, 2014a, 2014b). This is, among other things, because those who take over the outsourced work are mainly ‘[w]omen who are poor, migrant or minoritized’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2014b: 48). Within this broader frame, the right to have a harmonious family life in this regard also becomes a privilege of the middle- and upper-class outsourcing households in the global North.

Ignoring dirt in context: on remaining or becoming inattentive

What is perceived as dirt in a particular context is socially and culturally, as well as politically, constructed. What is more – as I will illustrate below – attentiveness to dirt in the geographical context of Austria is gendered in particular ways. People of all genders learn in concrete contexts how to orient their behaviour in relation to ‘dirt’. Among my participants, certain kinds of inattentive practice were associated with notions of masculinity – and normalcy – whereas ‘appropriate’ feminine attentiveness was generally seen to be ‘weird’, and pathologised in some instances.

As I mentioned above, the ten men and women who participated in the in-depth study in Vienna are white and middle-class, live with opposite-sex partners and outsource parts of their reproductive labour to migrant women who are performing domestic cleaning in the informal market. All the interviewees reported that within their relationship the woman did more unpaid domestic work at home than the man. None of my informants explicitly asserted that the reason for this distribution had to do with gender. What they did instead was to individualise their gendered divisions; their reasoning included arguments of personal preference, certain accidental character traits or circumstances. ‘It could also be the other way around’ was the tenor among informants. Yet, it tends not to be the other way around. A recent study (Öif, 2016) shows that, on average, women in Austria perform twenty-seven hours of unpaid domestic and care work per week; the respective number of hours for men is eleven. Even though my sample size does not allow for generalisable claims on this matter, it is obvious that there is a gendered pattern.

One pervasive line of explanation frequently used by both men and women respondents to account for their uneven allocation of domestic work was that they had different thresholds of tolerance of dirt. Some of my informants used the German word Schmutztoleranzgrenze, which translated means the threshold until which someone can tolerate dirt. This neologism is very close to the existing German word Schmerztoleranzgrenze, indicating the level up to which someone can tolerate pain or something that figuratively hurts.

In the individual interviews, I asked my informants to explain to me in detail what exactly they did at home and how they performed their daily domestic routines. The following quote of Jakob, one of the men in my sample, is related to the concept of dirt tolerance:

Jakob: Because if I have breakfast, I put away my dishes and my things – the things I took out of the fridge before. But the cutting board – if I’ve cut bread – I don’t wash the cutting board, and I don’t wash the knife- so there are still going to be some breadcrumbs. Or the coffee grinder- there might still be coffee on the counter spilled from when I filled that into the espresso maker. I don’t clean up after myself. So, I don’t take a sponge cloth and wipe everything clean and then leave the house. I put away the things and then just leave. And that is just like- my view of – I put away everything anyway and everything is gone versus, yes true, but it’s not clean. So I guess, that’s a bit the difference in our views really. (Individual interview, Jakob; emphasis mine)

I want to highlight that Jakob does tell me about the breadcrumbs and the spilled coffee, so he must have seen them, but he does not infer that they are his responsibility to clean up. Drawing on work on epistemologies of ignorance, I suggest as one interpretation for Jakob’s stance that his structurally privileged position affords him a presumed entitlement not to ‘clean up after (him)self’, as he says. This is so even though Jakob mentions in passing that he does have the necessary knowledge and tools required for the task (sponge cloth for wiping). The potentiality of him carrying out the task remains potential: he ‘could’ do it; this points to the divide between choice versus responsibility. Simultaneously, Jakob implies the existence of somebody else who actually ‘does’. Within the dominant paradigm of Western thought, the supposed independence of his status is not interrogated but strengthened; he does not have to utter the second part of the sentence ‘I don’t clean up after myself’ – ‘because somebody else does’, for it to be intelligible.

Alice’s account adds to a fuller picture of Jakob’s relationship with the breadcrumbs and spilled coffee on the counter. When I ask Alice if there were ever dissonances between her and her partner regarding the distribution of domestic chores, she says no. But as the interview continues, Alice shares the following:

I: So, yes – well, we touched on that a little bit already, but I’m gonna ask this still – so – Do you know what exactly Jakob does- ? Alice: -in the household? I: Yes. Alice: Yes (smiles), I do think that I know that (laughs). I: Uhm – so the breakfast things-? Alice: Well, breakfast – well – morning dishes, or kitchen, that’s his part … . He also gets the washing off the rack and stuff. Well, I often finish that. I don’t know if that fits here, but- I: Yes, yes (fast), that does all fit here (smiles)- Alice: Uhm, he puts away the dishes, but he doesn’t wipe off the counter. I do that, for example (smiles). So, I do the finishing touches then. Or, he gets the washing off the rack, but he doesn’t put [the washing] away. I also do that most of the time. Or, he takes the linen off the bed, but doesn’t put [the clean ones] on. So, it’s always half-finished, and I finish the things – more or less. Yes. I: Is that sometimes a reason for disagreement (laughs)? A: Yes, sometimes that’s annoying (does not laugh). Yeah. (Individual interview, Alice)

Importantly, none of the respondents in my sample reported that, after the employment of a domestic worker, the remaining work is being distributed differently – that is, more equally – between the partners. The women in the outsourcing households effectively now do less work. However, this is not because the men do more, but because the total amount of work to be done by the couple is reduced through the outsourcing of some of that work to another woman. Whether we understand this as a transfer of work from women to other women only, or, also importantly from privileged men to marginalised women is a political choice.

I understand the notion of Schmutztoleranz that I discuss here as an epistemic category and an example of a semipermeable membrane. In other words, learned forms of inattentiveness towards dirt and domestic work lead to ignorance as a particular form of knowledge, an ‘unknowing’. Epistemic Schmutztoleranz works as a semipermeable membrane that is open to some constituents and not to others; it shapes how dirty matter, or the work deemed necessary to clean dirt away, is seen or felt. The semipermeable dimension of the epistemic category of Schmutztoleranz structures what is allowed to ‘get through’ and what is not; what can be seen, felt or heard; what can pass and what is blocked.

In analogous ways to these forms of inattentiveness, employers are also non-responsive towards domestic workers. Most of my participants know very little about the people who have been cleaning their homes for years. They are mostly not at home when the workers are there. The home tours I conducted with the research participants in Vienna were meant to elicit narratives about other persons regularly present in their homes, who contribute to the creation and reproduction of the specific home spaces. I followed Kusenbach (2003) who argues that even when they do not involve encounters with other people, routine spatial practices are social in nature and ‘places represent others, and our feelings towards them’ (2003: 474). I thus assumed that the emerging narratives would include domestic workers, especially since the respondent knew that I was interested in the topic of ‘outsourcing’. However, my participants hardly mentioned the people working on and in these spaces during the home tours. This meant that this method did not bring the kind of data I had expected; it did, however, underline the invisibility of the domestic workers and the fact that most of the employers are not present while the workers are cleaning. Theo, one of the men who participated in the empirical study, told me that he ‘tried to’ not be present when the domestic worker was there, as her presence made him ‘uncomfortable’ (individual interview, Theo). ⁵

Thus, the practices of privileged irresponsibility (Tronto, 1993) and related epistemic ignorance I highlight here come out of a double move: first, they are borne out of inattentiveness to dirt and the work required to deal with it; second, as I hinted at in the previous paragraph, they include non-responsiveness towards those people who perform this work. The degradation of workers and the devaluation of reproductive work are intertwined in a gendered and racialised loop. Inattentiveness towards the work and non-responsiveness towards the workforce meet at privileged irresponsibility – or the ‘privilege’ not to care.

Denying relationality as a lack of self-knowledge

José Medina (2013) develops an account of (epistemic) responsibility and formulates three required cognitive minimums of knowledge. He emphasises the connectedness of responsibility and epistemic competence: ‘there is no responsibility unless there is a minimal knowledge about self, others, and the world’ (Medina, 2013: 127). Drawing on relational conceptualisations of identity and a relational view of self-knowledge, Medina argues that both in the case of racial ignorance, and in the case of gender ignorance, ‘the lack of knowledge about one’s others (people of other races or of other genders) becomes simultaneously a lack of knowledge about oneself’ (2013: 128–129). These structural, and actively produced, epistemic deficiencies are ‘prompted and protected by situations of oppression [that] undermine one’s status as a responsible agent’ (Medina, 2013: 129). Medina maintains that ‘[s]ystematic injustice produces irresponsible agents, for they tend to lack knowledge of themselves, of others, and of the world’ (2013: 131).

Explicit racialisation and ethnic stereotyping of domestic workers were very rare in my empirical sample. ⁶ Yet, the little information the research participants could offer about the women working in their households, and the employers’ efforts to be absent and literally not ‘see’ them, are a central part of the employers’ substantive practices of ignorance of the domestic worker and her circumstances. While attentiveness and responsiveness are skills that outsourcing households demand from domestic workers, most members of outsourcing households who took part in my study seemed rather non-responsive towards the worker they employ. I claim that this non-responsiveness contains a lack of knowledge about one’s own position of interdependence that takes for granted the care one receives, without acknowledging or reciprocating it. This non-responsiveness can also be understood as a semipermeable membrane: a relation that lets through only some constituents and blocks others. The products of the worker’s labour are enjoyed in the household, but the person doing the labour is disregarded.

This brings me to Sarah Lucia Hoagland’s (2007) account of whiteness. Hoagland emphasises that whiteness is built on exclusion and racial subjection. She argues that through an epistemology that presupposes autonomy and denies relationality between knower and known, these relationalities are rendered invisible. Hoagland discerns that what is invisible within a system of white supremacy is not whiteness, but the relationality with, our interdependence with, peoples of colour; ‘that we are indebted to, made possible by, responsible to people of color’ (Hoagland, 2007: 99). Hoagland writes: ‘I am not making a moral point here; I am making an ontological point. I am not talking about acknowledging a debt; I am talking about whites’ existence’ (2007: 99; emphasis in original). She continues: ‘That (most) whites walk through our day ignorant of our interdependency with peoples of color is not about the invisibility of whiteness but rather about the erasure of peoples of color as subjects’ (Hoagland, 2007: 99; emphasis in original).

An epistemology of ignorance, then, is an epistemology that structurally and violently fails to perceive existing connections. These missing connections distort the image a privileged subject has of ‘others’; and – drawing on Medina – we can add, they simultaneously constitute a fundamental lack of self-knowledge.