Representations of cleaning can conjure a whole basket of responsibilities and relationships, folded through history into visions of care abundance, and stacked across competing desires and anxieties around liberation and oppression. Take the opening murder sequence from Alice Lowe’s horror-comedy, Prevenge (2016). Lowe’s protagonist, overcome with a hetero-fatalist, prepartum rage directed at outsized masculine ego, follows the local pub DJ—a swaggering, entitled manbaby—back to his flat, where she fatally stabs him. His mother appears—clearly suffering from age-related cognitive decline—to suggest that a “bit of bleach” might be needed for the carpet. Alice leads her back to bed, while the mother worries that “we need to put a wash on.” “Do you want a cup of hot chocolate or anything?,” asks Alice. No, no: sleep and cleaning are the priorities. Sleep for mother, cleaning for Alice. After a dutiful genre shot of tap water rinsing the murder weapon, Alice loads the washing machine with clothes. A short but resonant “beeeep” signals that it’s ready to clean. A political screed unspools from this one, brief act of cleaning: the destruction of patriarchy, necessarily coterminous with the flourishing of more fulsome caring relationships—the kind that could actually sustain us amid the polycrisis of demographic ageing, economic stagnation, and environmental collapse.

Or take the closing moments from Fronza Woods’s documentary, Fannie’s Film (1981). In a slow motion shot, the titular Fannie, a 65-year-old Black New Yorker, polishes a dance studio mirror wall, smiling brilliantly as she works. Director Woods asks the final question of the disembodied, non-synchronous interview: “What would you like to be if you were reborn?”. “The same old Fannie,” says Fannie, before beginning to sing—“Dear Lord”—the first words to a song we never hear. The shot suggests that cleaning is a potential site of pleasure, even “artistry.”[1] But the slow motion and truncated spiritual, in conjunction with the white, middle class dance studio setting, also unravels a history of racial domination entwined with labor exploitation, and a future where the sedimented struggles of the past come to bear on the demands of the present. Already, cleaning is a complicated business.

These cinematic examples point towards an enduring truth: even when cleaning is presented as comedic, belletristic, or just a matter of fact, its depiction always summons the political. The ceaseless proliferation of cleaning videos on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram is one, anxious symptom of heightened, post-COVID-19 pressures on the domestic sphere.[2] YouTube, arguably the most significant audiovisual archive in human history, is a vast repository of cleaning media.[3] The prominence of cleaning is unsurprising, given YouTube’s abiding “ideology of authenticity,” which prioritizes the irrefutable realness of the everyday.[4] Is there anything more authentic or everyday than mopping the floor? As in the films above, politics stalks the periphery of YouTube cleaning.[5]

“Extreme cleaning” on YouTube has particularly vivid stakes. Content creators like Clean with Barbie and Coline Cleans enter dangerously unsanitary homes, often inhabited by people with complex mental health issues (including hoarding disorders), and/or experiencing overlapping external crises. These videos respond to the material issues facing the communities in which they are embedded. In one video, Mack, the founder of Midwest Magic Cleaning, wonders why there “seems to be an epidemic of hoarding where I’m from.”[6] He’s from small-town South Central Illinois, and we can safely speculate that the proliferation of mental health disorders dovetails with the unemployment, addiction, and hopelessness that has attended deindustrialization in rust belt America.[7] Small-town Illinois also sees the confluence of hoarding disorders with prepper sensibilities. We might wonder about the queasy political allegiances of these participants, or, more fruitfully, consider how mounds of clothes and stockpiled tins are both fearfully oriented towards the future, anticipating an internal overwhelm emanating from one’s own emotional instability and an external overwhelm rooted in the possibility of political or environmental instability.[8] Regardless of whether the creators ever take political positions (they rarely do), these videos possess an autonomic political character given the ways that domestic spaces in crisis inevitably index the social world around them.

Cleaning media germinated during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when “scenes of [domestic] calm control” became an analgesic against the stress and uncertainty of contagion.[9] Many of the creators who were micro-influencers pre-pandemic—like Auri Katariina, the Finnish éminence grise of YouTube extreme cleaning—are now highly profitable brands. This virality accompanied a resurgence of cleaning in the discourse of the political right. Some of these tendencies were long-standing, like the association of cleanliness with racial and moral purity—a key precept for Hindutva ethno-nationalism—and the mobilization of cleanliness as a “racial spatial order” to justify urban redevelopment, community displacement, and a “better, whiter, gentrified future.”[10] Other aspects of the right’s fascination with cleaning piggybacked on neoliberal bootstrapism. “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world,” the sixth commandment from Jordan Peterson’s best-selling 12 Rules for Life, centres cleaning as a key index of conscientiousness and self-respect, and a condition for participation in public life.[11] A vicious ideology unfolds, in which those who can’t clean independently, or don’t have access to cleaning resources, are excluded from these qualities, and eventually excluded from the category of personhood altogether. The “unclean” are constructed as entirely disposable, justifying the immiseration of disabled people, homeless people, and other populations on the periphery of capitalist production, via austerity, dispossession, and criminalization.[12] These impulses converge in what Alberto Toscano calls the “late fascist” politics of “antagonistic reproduction”: the capacity of migrants and other marginalised populations to get the cleaning done is pitted against the capacities of the national volk, and the “organized abandonment” of the former is presented as the necessary condition for the state-funded care of the latter.[13]

In the online culture wars, cleaning—as an activity and a signifier—can’t be separated from a calcification of femininity, engineered simultaneously by algorithmic overdetermination and right wing ideologues.[14] Cleaning (or just being “clean”) has lost an innocence that it never really possessed.[15] A woman cleaning her apartment is a potential “trad wife.” A vaguely minimalist outfit is a potential #cleangirl moment. (There are over 800 thousands #cleangirl posts on TikTok—a trend of aspirational blandness that figures alongside “beige mom” and “vanilla girl” as an exclusionary revanchism of white European beauty standards.[16]) This calcification of gender in online spaces is nowhere more apparent than in the world of “cleanfluencers” (cleaning influencers), many of whose brands—“Mrs Hinch,” for example—depend on a performance of perfect domestic femininity.[17] Cleanfluencers offer advice on “household management,” connecting them to a lineage of domestic self-help that was institutionalised in the nineteenth century via maternalistic proto-influencers like Isabella Beeton and Catherine Beecher.[18] Fundamentally, what unites a now diverse assemblage of cleanfluencer styles, across a wide array of platforms, is their commitment to functionally supporting “household management” through practical cleaning tips, soothing audiovisual content that motivates and facilitates viewers to clean, and the manufacture of a bewitching horizon of perfect cleanliness.

Since the popularization of the cleanfluencer label in 2019, platformized cleaning media has balkanized into five distinct subgenres.[19] Alongside extreme cleaners, there are “instructors,” “declutterers,” “specialists,” and “aspirational aesthetes.” “Instructors” communicate practical information—how to make your own antibacterial spray or remove stubborn limescale. “Declutterers” focus on organising and taxonomizing, and their content ranges from sorting socks to bandwagoning on trends like Japanese minimalism and “Swedish death cleaning.”[20] “Specialists” clean particular items (like rugs) or particular spaces (like lawns or gardens). “Aspirational aesthetes” use cleaning trends like #SundayReset as pretexts to display their high-value, antiseptic property (homes, cars, possessions) and eerily harmonious, heteronormative relationships. Extreme cleaning is in the lineage of hoarding reality television, but it is also a syncretic amalgam of this evolving cleaning universe, assimilating tropes from every subgenre. The extreme cleaner becomes an “instructor” when they switch to a pedagogic register. The pleasure of “specialist” cleaning videos is found in the attention to particular household items (sinks, primarily). The geometric satisfaction of “decluttering,” with its spatial reconfiguration of the home, is present in extreme cleaners’ putative aim of helping hoarders implement long-term and sustainable systems of household management. Finally, the tone of “aspirational aesthetic” content is integrated through negation: the home that you should desire, say extreme cleaners, is exactly the opposite of this one.

There is, of course, crossover between these subgenres, and some features crop up throughout contemporary cleaning content: use of “platform affordances” like YouTube’s Partner Program, channel membership, and superchat function;[21] formal aspects, both auditory (ASMR voiceovers and oddly-satisfying soundscapes) and visual (use of sped-up video, simulating the effect of time-lapse photography);[22] commercial features such as sponsorship by prominent cleaning brands; paratextual conventions like influencer collabs, where creators appear in each other’s videos; and modes of spectatorial community that revolve around collective admiration for the wisdom and unflappability of the cleanfluencer. These subgenres have a lot in common, but extreme cleaning is a singular world into itself.

When we watch extreme cleaning—which foregoes the contrivances of decluttering, aspirational aesthetic, and instructional content—we’re watching somewhere very dirty getting cleaned. Crucially, in these videos, the cleaning responds to fundamental, actually-existing human needs. Our bodies, homes, and possessions all get dirty, and if we stop cleaning, their usefulness decreases over time and eventually disappears entirely. The capacity of our bodies to get us paid through work diminishes, along with their ability to keep on keeping on. The capacity of our possessions to provide sustenance and pleasure diminishes, as does the capacity of our homes to offer meaningful shelter and sanctuary.

Marxist feminists file cleaning under the category of “social reproduction,” in part, to flag this indispensability.[23] Often occluded or underestimated, “social reproduction” is the activity that produces labour-power as a commodity that can be bought and sold.[24] Cooking, cleaning, caring, and innumerable other tasks create and re-create the worker, day-to-day and intergenerationally, as a person with the strength, skills, and knowledge that an employer might want to buy. In fact, these capacities are the central inputs in capital’s “value-machine,” which results in fortunes for a few, destitution for many, and wage dependency for the masses.[25] On a grander (and more diffuse) conception, social reproduction is the matrix of “life-making” activities that produces human sociality tout court.[26] All this leads right-wingers towards the condescension of necessity. Social reproduction is an essential feature of every society (an innocuous premise), therefore its organization—who does what tasks and how—is immutable, ahistorical, and preordained (a big leap): the cleaning just has to get done, probably by those more naturally “suited” to low-paid or unremunerated work, i.e. women and racialized people (a reactionary conclusion).[27] Move along folks, nothing to see here. Anything so integral to survival, it’s assumed, takes on an atavistic, quasi-mechanical quality, bereft of imagination, creativity, psychic complexity, ethical positions, or political stakes. Extreme cleaning on YouTube gives lie to this view, which, it goes without saying, couldn’t be further from the truth. The organization of social reproduction is not only an open question and a site of struggle: it may be the foundational political question of our time.[28] It’s worth saying again: cleaning is a complicated business.

Marxist sociologist Kristin Munro suggests that social reproduction theory figures not as a systematic (re)conceptualization of the economy, but as a “revolutionary strategy,” aimed at “identifying the working class on the assumption that the correct definition can help to bring about communism.”[29] The first part seems true. Social reproduction theory has always existed in excess of scholastic debates, and new ideas in this tradition often emerge from organic connections to ongoing struggles within and through the revolutionary left.[30] The second half of Munro’s diagnosis, however, is overly deflationary. Social reproduction isn’t merely an arid, Aristotelian rubric for whittling down the genus “proletariat” to its correct dimensions. In my experience, when social reproduction functions as a “revolutionary strategy,” it’s more concerned with re-orientating political action towards zones that have been historically ignored by swathes of the left due to a myopic exclusivity around the “immediate production process.”[31] This strategy centers schools, public services, neighborhoods, and homes as vital areas of struggle. The possibilities of YouTube extreme cleaning rest, partly, on its representation of the zone of reproduction qua zone of reproduction. In other words, its representation of the home as a site of labor (the creator’s cleaning) and refusal (the hoarder’s non-cleaning). We’re granted access to what Jordy Rosenberg, punning on Marx, calls the “hiddener abode” of production.[32] Social reproduction also functions as a meta-critique of the movements themselves—a way of thinking about how organizing spaces should operate. The provision of food and childcare in meetings becomes important, as do questions around who does the labor of making, serving, and caring.

There are a glut of strategic questions that social reproduction makes urgent: What would it mean to refuse to do the cleaning, cooking, and caring? What would an organization that could coordinate this refusal look like? Would such an action amount to little more than collective masochism evacuated of pleasure? What genre of political action becomes necessary when the strike is impossible? If every strike is always a test of how long workers can sustain themselves independent of the state and capital, should our energy be directed towards increasing our capacity for autonomous social reproduction? How do we learn from historic movements towards the autonomous collectivization of social reproduction, from the Black Panthers’ breakfast programs to Women Against Pit Closures? And how do we pursue these questions without retreating into a parochial, prefigurative politics that dreams of exit without conflict, a commune without communards?

These questions all hover over issues connected to what some communists call the “social strike”: the exertion of leverage through mass refusal that takes place outside the immediate production process.[33] Boycotts (consumption strikes), women’s/ climate/student strikes, public transport trespass, strikes against rent and debt: these are all iterations of the social strike. Social reproduction is the strategic orientation that unfurls the social strike as a tactic. Here’s my provocation, inspired by Tithi Bhattacharya’s call for “strategy as a heuristic principle”: in studying cleaning media, we should repurpose political tactics as methods, and the method at hand is the social strike.[34] This approach simply means relating a media text to the possibility of concrete political action. It is a method that is primed towards the present—every “conjuncture” contains unique layers of contradiction that require analysis[35]—but also towards the future as a “not-yet” realized, hoarded potentia latent in existing cultural practices and social relations.[36]

Although it might not seem like it on the greasy surface, extreme cleaning videos are more than “spectacular morality.”[37] The cycle of cleaning reality TV that preceded platform hegemony, exemplified by shows like A&E’s Hoarders (2009–), was undoubtedly based on a charitable hierarchy, in which beneficent producers swooped in to rescue the feckless, indolent poor. In contemporary extreme cleaning content, however, recipients aren’t vetted on the basis of moralistic criteria, and they aren’t channelled into patrician reform programs. In fact, participant anonymity is a marked feature of the subgenre. Creators are sensitive to the underlying causes of personal crises, although some causes can be named (mental health issues, trauma, disability, neurodivergence, addiction, lack of services, health issues, the family regulation system), while others remain unspoken (structural racism and the legacies of slavery and colonialism; policing, prisons, and borders; sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; debt, insecure housing, and poverty; overwork, unemployment, and capital accumulation). Despite these shortcomings, dirt for these creators exists in a social world, determined, to some extent, by relations of power.

In the titles of extreme cleaning videos, “free” is second only to permutations of “clean” as the most common signifier. Freeness is usually shouted at the audience—“FREE!”—and becomes a necessary prefix or addendum to titles and descriptions, such that the propositional structure becomes “FREE cleaning for [x]” or “I cleaned [y] for FREE.” Freeness is centred in the paratextual construction of creators’ online identities. Clean with Barbie’s YouTube bio reads: “EXTREME CLEANER IN NEW YORK. I help people with mental or physical illness for FREE.” In an important, genre-defining sense, the freeness of the cleaning is as vital as the service itself. Part of what makes extreme cleaning extreme is the lack of compensation. So, how should we understand the FREEness of this service? Our first instinct might be to dismiss it as the cheapest kind of a gimmick à la Sianne Ngai: “free” works overtime to occlude the profits generated for content creators via advertisements, product placement, and paid subscribers.[38] The cleaning is as free as FREE Amazon delivery, i.e. free in some superficial, immediate sense, but with hidden costs for everyone involved. On this reading, free cleaning is just the continued creep of capital into every cranny of social life, accumulating via every possible cell of human agency—“total subsumption,” as Jacques Cammette called it.[39]

Of course, there is some truth in this, and a recuperative reading of extreme cleaning shouldn’t blind us to some undeniable truths: none of these creators have explicitly left-wing politics, as far as I can tell; extreme cleaning is a business that provides a handsome income for some creators; the most prominent extreme cleaners are white, despite the fact that in America and across the world the majority of cleaning is done by women of color[40]; and the focus on the radical transformation of space in the interests of cleanliness might well reify the same racialized, “teleological narrative” that undergirds gentrification and displacement.[41] However, sometimes it’s worth staying with the most vulgar, material fact around: “freeness” in extreme cleaning means, first and foremost, a service that is free at the point of use for those who need it. As Nicole Froio argues, much cleaning media plays on our desire for a “collective mode of housework.”[42] On this account, the unity of participant, creator, and spectator in extreme cleaning functions as a digital surrogate for the full “socialisation of housework” through state-funded, community-controlled cleaning facilities.[43] After “wages for housework,” this longstanding call for the full socialization of care and cleaning is the central “feminist demand” generated by social reproduction theory.[44]

After upheaval and defeat, we can’t afford to see solely profit and domination everywhere we look. We have to search like magpies for silver in the dirt. This is why I propose joining the social strike method to a Warholian aspiration to like everything, or, at the very least, to first look for the penumbral utopia in culture, before consigning it to the dustbin of “total subsumption.”[45] This recklessly reparative approach piques our curiosity about the relationship between the withdrawal of an essential service like cleaning from the marketplace—extreme cleaning’s decommodifying posture, its “freeness”—and the necessary conditions and orientations for a successful social strike.

 

An orientation towards fragility: Mutual-ish Aid

 

Humans are needy creatures. The aim of the social strike, in part, is to pit a logic of needs against the logic of accumulation by manifesting a living “politics of interdependence.”[46] Vulnerability is distributed unevenly, of course, but we are all affected by one another and our environments.[47] “Mutual-ish Aid” in extreme cleaning centers frailty, pain, and exhaustion, alongside occasional (milquetoast) social critique. Key to this orientation is an equality in neediness between the content creator, video participant, and audience, eschewing the service provider/service user dichotomy that is present in much charity work, welfare provision, and what is sometimes dismissed in left spaces as “radical social work.” Disaster for the creator is always a possibility with extreme cleaning. “Free Cleaning Gone Wrong!,” produced by Scotland-based Fife Free Cleaning, has the thumbnail text “I ALMOST DIED!.”[48] The video shows one of the cleaners having an asthma attack and driving to the emergency room. This kind of extreme contingency is strangely representative of extreme cleaning, where subscribers show equal amounts of moral admiration and physical/ emotional concern for the creators. Mack of Midwest Magic Cleaning regularly discusses his neurodivergence and mental health issues, in a register that makes clear that the gift of cleaning is extended not to a qualitatively different kind of needy person but to individuals who suffer like him. Hoarding disorder is situated within a universal spectrum of vulnerability to mental distress and potential crisis.[49]

Carla, founder of the Carla Project YouTube channel, is not a typical extreme cleaner. She mostly produces “decluttering” content, but, like many cleanfluencers in other subgenres, Carla sometimes flits on the edges of extreme cleaning. In a sixteen-part playlist titled “DECLUTTERING MY SISTER SHERRY’S HOUSE,” Carla subverts both the conventions of hoarding reality television and YouTube extreme cleaning, while participating in a recognizable mode of horizontal vulnerability.[50] Carla doesn’t use “extreme” or “free” in her titles or descriptions, even though, by the standards of the subgenre, the cleaning is both. Carla also rejects participant anonymity, uplifting Sherry’s testimony and their sisterly craic. Despite a recognizable TV-style format, the series departs significantly from shows like Hoarders: Sherry is never traduced for her hoarding, or lectured by a so-called “specialist”; the visual style doesn’t aim to sensationalize the hoard, or present it as repellent or perverse; and a distinctly gentler rhythm disrupts the accelerated aesthetics of both cleaning reality TV and extreme cleaning on YouTube. Transformational sequences are sometimes sped-up, but this footage sits alongside slower moments where the sisters discuss, in a spirit of collaboration and consent, which items can be thrown away. This altered form allows the video to move from the “hectic slowness” that characterizes much cleaning media and digital life in general—the perpetual rush of progress scrubbed of satisfaction—to a genuinely decelerated temporality of care.[51] In these short digressions from the cleaning, the sisters joke about their shared love of mason jars and vitamin supplements and the relative likelihood of their surviving a zombie apocalypse (Sherry is a prepper).[52]

Alongside these joyful moments, Carla and Sherry are frank about the toll that cleaning takes: “I’ve never been so exhausted doing a cleanup,” Carla confides in a handheld address to the camera.[53] In the next episode, they sit down on Sherry’s bed together, looking cheerier: “We’re both exhausted and we don’t want to declutter today.”[54] So, instead, they discuss the drivers of compulsive buying, a site of mutuality for the sisters, as Carla concedes that she has many of the same habits as her sister. In episode 12 of the series, Carla conducts a self-contained interview with Sherry, in which the sisters discuss the potential hereditary origins of hoarding and its interaction with depression.[55] The creator, participant, and audience instantiate a community of shared vulnerability, neediness, and caring capacity, and this is the cornerstone of “mutual-ish aid.”

 

An orientation towards targets: Enemy Location

 

Extreme cleaning provides a concrete orientation towards targets for the social strike. Any effective strike requires identifying the locus of power that collective action is directed against, the entity that can accede to demands.[56] In revolutionary moments, the target might be as grand as the state or the ruling class as such, and concession might mean self-abolition, or at least an unfettered transfer of power. In more modest, workaday organizing contexts, we worry about where power really lies on any given material issue at any given conjuncture: City council or the state legislature? CEO or shareholders? Property management company or development conglomerate? These can be tricky questions given the concertinaed ownership structure within capitalist firms and the equally complex representational structures within local and national government. Extreme cleaning doesn’t worry about these minutiae, but it produces two excellent targets: the rentier and the family regulation system.

Landlords are absent from most extreme cleaning videos, but there is one notable exception. In “EXTREME Kitchen Cleaning to Avoid Eviction | Satisfying Transformation!,” Coline, an extreme cleaner based in the Netherlands and founder of Coline Cleans, explains that the apartment’s kitchen is about to get demolished, and the resident is concerned that the contractors will refuse to do the job or report the apartment to the housing association, leading to their eviction.[57] A standard clean ensues, but the “satisfying” experience of the video lies both in the stark before-and-after images of the apartment and the presentation of the clean as an act of community self-defense—for the tenant, and against the landlord. The video title mobilizes “eviction” to produce a friend/enemy distinction: we’re on the side of the (potentially) evicted, and in opposition to the evictor.[58] This polarizing force is replicated in the comments section of the video: in this class war between tenants and landlords, viewers split into pro-tenant partisans (“I am so happy you saved her from eviction . ❤”) and bootlickers for rentierism (“Landlords are people too and this is probably a investment for their retirement”). Whether these statements rest on sincerely-held, substantive political commitments is unknown, and, in a sense, irrelevant: what’s important is that they reproduce the logic of polarized conflict latent in the video and society at large.

“Enemy Location” channels populist ressentiment against those who enact the violence that underlies extreme dirt. Sometimes this enemy is the state. In “I Cleaned for FREE to Help a Mom Battling Child Protection💔,” the first in a four-part series representing a week of full-time cleaning, Barbie (of Clean with Barbie) explains that the tenant’s child is likely to be taken into state care if the house is not cleaned.[59] So-called family services are a means of policing poor and working class families—in the American context disproportionately Black families—and leave a legacy of acute trauma for those entangled in the system.[60] In the first five minutes of this video, there is an Elmo toy nestled between the mess, centered in the frame. It’s a shocking reminder that a child played in this dangerous environment, but Elmo’s presence also reminds the viewer that the identification of a target is not purely a process of negation. The desire to abolish the systemic cruelty of the family regulation system furnishes us with a second desire: to produce structures that reduce the risk of homes becoming unsafe, and create the kinds of robust communities where a child living in these conditions is unimaginable.

In the case of this family, those structures would be free health care, mental health services, and disability support. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition is as much the “fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” as it is the absence of oppressive state infrastructure.[61] Again, the friend/enemy framing (“battling” the state, as the title says), produces a mirrored division in the comments, between unadulterated support for a family unity combined with a nuanced understanding of “family protection” versus shills for the family regulation system. This comment (the second most liked) and the top response in a long thread is worth quoting at length:

Comment: “It makes me sad when people protecting children are portrayed as villains that should be battled. This mother clearly needs help, and when she can provide her child with a safe and healthy (enough) home again, the child will be allowed to move back in.” (173 likes)

Response to comment: “ok, but maybe give her help before so the kid doesn’t have to go to foster care. i’ve volunteered with young adults who aged out of foster care and the conditions are so bad for them. One of my youth jumped backwards out of a window at his foster placement so he could become disabled because his worker told him that was the only way out of his placement. Virtually all of the youth were lgbtq and had been sexually and phsyically [sic] abused by their foster placements and were taken out of homes with loving parents who just were overwhelmed or poor and messy and they get sent into situations that are violent as “protection” sometimes in a whole other state. They also get taken in the middle of the night because there is less chance mom will run. The kids end up thinking they did something wrong or bad.” (29 likes)

What’s clear from this debate is that the framing of “battling” produces the idea of a “villain,” which the community wants to endorse, nuance, or reject outright. Every struggle needs a villain. In industrial action, this is usually fairly simple. The social strike requires a more imaginative approach to enemy location.

 

An orientation towards the global: Subscriber Internationalism

 

What can we salvage from Auri Katariina, the self-styled “greatest cleaner in the world”? Auri is without doubt the most successful operator in this subgenre, with over twenty million combined followers across all platforms. Success and visibility is attended by a level of professionalism that we don’t see with other extreme cleaners, and a slightly more mannered online persona, unusual for the constitutionally vulnerable extreme cleaner.[62] Auri is managed by a brand consultancy firm; she has a carefully curated, highly feminized aesthetic that extends across her personal style, video content, and merchandise range; and her videos are produced with better image quality and slicker editing. There’s also more transparency regarding the backend of extreme cleaning: anyone can visit her website to learn about the process in more detail, and anyone can apply to have their home cleaned by Auri. This represents a radical geographic expansion of the recipients typically in receipt of extreme cleaning, which is usually rooted in a particular place (New York for Barbie, South Central Illinois for Midwest Magic Cleaning, the East coast of Scotland for Fife Free Cleaning). Auri has travelled all over the world to clean, but as the description of many of her videos reads, “I clean my followers [sic] homes for free!.” This “subscriber Internationalism” rests on a liberal cosmopolitanism that hides some fundamental exclusions in who can access certain kinds of content, given the necessary digital infrastructure. She’s redrawn Stoicism’s concentric circles of ethical commitment, and put platform loyalty slap-bang in the middle. If “mutual-ish aid” in extreme cleaning expresses a latent anarchist bent towards the local, then Auri’s “subscriber internationalism” has the flavour of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”—the bloated ambition of a prematurely global project. Via her lucrative sponsorship deal with Scrub Daddy, Auri has found a way to make her online community feel more concretely connected: her itinerance makes everyone closer by proxy, because, as she says at the close of her YouTube landing page video, “by watching my videos, you’re helping too.”[63] The social strike needs this transcendence of borders.

 

***

 

Auri’s most-beloved catchphrase is “I love trashes!,” a cutesy reminder that she is producing content in her second language. (The hot pink t-shirt with this slogan is currently sold out on her website.) In her most recent video, when she encounters thick layers of a mysterious dark substance, clinging to an oven top, she purrs:

Aren’t we loving this brown stuff?! Oh my God, this brown grime. It’s so beautiful! Oh my gosh, it’s so satisfying. I just love my job. At these moments, these precious moments, I’m just enjoying myself so much.[64]

Even if we bracket the complex erotics of these moments, Auri’s enthusiasm—the regular refrain that she “loves to clean!”—has a dense and contradictory function. It figures, in the first instance, as a familiar set of oppressive commands: love your job, love cleaning, love filth! Auri’s synthesis of enthusiasm for dirt and exaggerated femininity pushes the fraught claim that certain populations are more suited to cleaning simply because they enjoy it. At the same time, Auri’s pleasure alerts us to the ways that extreme cleaners, taken as a whole, transmit a rich (and contradictory) range of emotional fields to the audience. Each of the above orientations is propelled by a different affect: exhaustion in “mutual-ish aid,” hatred and anger in “enemy location,” and joy in “subscriber internationalism.”[65]

Extreme cleaning maps some of the dominant ways of experiencing contemporary capitalism: exhaustion, anger, and joy become a fragmenting totality, perpetually undermining and illuminating each other, representing an inescapable ambivalence. Comporting ourselves in relation to ambivalence is an enduring aporia of political organizing. Often, we have to suspend this complexity. Locating “enemies” doesn’t allow for diverse feelings towards the target. However, long-term, sustainable organizing requires cultivating an openness to the brute fact of ambivalence: the co-presence of seemingly incommensurate feelings like anger, joy, and exhaustion towards an object is a structuring feature of our psychic lives.[66] Working out when ambivalence can be entertained and when it can’t—a tiring, satisfying, ugly, uncertain, laborious, hopeful process—has to be performed again and again ad infinitum, much like doing the dishes.

Ambivalence towards cleaning and organizing is always under threat from the flattening fiat of immediacy: these activities are supposed to be a pure extension of our most natural, human proclivities. But just as we’re sometimes angry at baby for forcing us to clean the bib over and over, we also feel envy towards our comrades, resentment towards organizing work itself, and fear about the very horizon of social transformation that we’re fighting for.[67] Abolition teaches us to accept that we all experience the kind of fractured mental and emotional lives that could lead us to enact harm. Integrating this into emancipatory politics requires our collective reconciliation to emotional contradiction and complexity. Such a reconciliation might require the commingling of “technologies of the self” with political spaces, reimagining the storied practices of “self-criticism” popular among left movements in the 1960s and 1970s.[68]

Taken in this spirit, as a mucky ensemble, extreme cleaning videos are a riposte to Peterson’s mode of betterment drained of psychic contradiction and collectivity. They provide the proleptic vision of a “Little Red Self-Help Channel,” readily available at our fingertips—a resource for self-transformation that would be simultaneously soothing and politicizing, motivational and communal.[69] The structure of ambivalence reflects the ingrained equivocation of the social strike itself—what some have called its “impossibility.”[70] In contrast to how we approach traditional industrial action, we have to contend with the fact that refusal to clean may cause harm to other members of the working class; it may cause harm to our loved ones. We have to imagine a way of withdrawing from cleaning that builds autonomy and power, and reconnects us—in a joyful, messy embrace—with the possibility of communism.

 

Thank you to Rebecca Ariel Porte for her perceptive and careful edits on this piece.

 

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[1] Valerie Smith, “Reconstituting the Image,” Callaloo 37 (1988), 712.

[2] These “heightened pressures” are parsed by many as a “crisis of care” or a “crisis of social reproduction.” See, for example, Emma Dowling, The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (London: Verso, 2021); Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017),  37-67.

[3] YouTube is the most visited website in the world after Google; between three and five billion videos are watched there every day. See Laura Ceci, “Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute,” Statistica (2024) https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/.

[4] Birgit Richard, “Media Masters & Grassroots Art 2.0 on YouTube,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), 143.

[5] In the interests of creating a more manageable corpus with clearer formal continuities, I’m focusing on YouTube extreme cleaners. YouTube is extreme cleaning’s natural habitat, partly because it accommodates longer-form videos, but this content is also popular in an even more highly edited form on Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms.

[6] Mack Leighty has worked under several pseudonyms over the years, including “John Cheese” when he was a journalist for Cracked Magazine in the 2010s. During his time there, Mack used his platform to engage in a pattern of sexual harassment against precarious female colleagues and fans. I’ve included Midwest Magic Cleaning in my analysis for a few reasons. First, of the YouTube channels that post primarily extreme cleaning content, Midwest Magic Cleaning is the second most popular with over 720,000 subscribers. It’s comfortably the biggest extreme cleaning channel based in the United States. Excluding the channel would entail presenting only a partial portrait of the contemporary extreme cleaning landscape. Second, this essay is not a celebration of individual creators but an exploration of the political possibilities disclosed via the forms embedded in this subgenre. Third, the stark contrast between Mack’s YouTube persona (based on personal vulnerability, empathy and kindness towards video participants, and a family-orientated business model) and his IRL behaviour highlights the ways that online identities are consciously constructed to meet the expectations and desires of an imagined audience. The qualities that fans love in Mack’s cleanfluencer persona are an instructively transparent performance of “staged authenticity.” The fact that these qualities are expected, desired, and valued within extreme cleaning fandom speaks to the collective, horizontal neediness constitutive of the subgenre—a feature that I discuss later in this essay. See: Mingyi Hou, “Social Media Celebrity and the Institutionalization of YouTube.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 25, no. 3 (2019), 548.

[7] .  Ryan Zickgraf, “The State of Illinois Is Killing My Family,” Jacobin Magazine, August 23, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/08/downstate-illinois-corruption-deindustrialization-democratic-party. See also Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023).

[8] I’m relying here on a classical psychoanalytic understanding of anxiety, on the assumption that anxiety is a constituent feature of both hoarding and prepping. See, for example, Marvin Hurvich, “Fear of Being Overwhelmed and Psychoanalytic Theories of Anxiety,” Psychoanalytic Review 87, no. 5 (2000), 615-649.

[9] Floss Knight, quoted in Nicole Froio, “The Rise of the Cleanfluencer,” Dame Magazine, March 22, 2022. https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/22/the-rise-of-the-cleanfluencer/.

[10] Marisa Solomon, ““The Ghetto is a Gold Mine”: The Racialized Temporality of Betterment,” International Labor and Working-Class History 95 (2019): 89, 77.

[11] Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (London: Penguin, 2018).

[12] The presidency of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines (and to a lesser extent his successor Bongbong Marcos) is an extreme, recent case study in this brand of dehumanization, as the “drug addict” and “drug dealer” came to signify a threefold uncleanliness: perceptual blights on the street, a contaminant in the national social order, and unhygienic bodies. See Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines (London: Atlantic Books, 2023).

[13] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism (London: Verso, 2023). The concept of “organized abandonment” comes from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), 178.

[14] For an analysis of how performances of normative femininity yields clicks, see Sophie Bishop, “Anxiety, panic and self-optimization: Inequalities and the YouTube algorithm,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24, no. 1 (2018).

[15] Cleanliness and cleaning has become an arch example of the right’s tendency towards the “rendering aesthetic” of politics, Walter Benjamin, ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” marxists.org (1998 [1936]), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.

[16] Steffi Cao, “white women want their power back: on bbls and balletcore, and the entropy of aesthetic,” it’s steffi, 7th February, 2023.

[17] See Emma Casey and Jo Littler, “Mrs Hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework: Scouring away the crisis?,” The Sociological Review 70, no. 3 (2021), 489-505.

[18] See Sarah Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[19] For early mainstream discourse on cleanfluencers, see Noelle Faulkner, “Everything to know about the rise of the cleanfluencer,” Vogue Australia, 10th November 2019, https://www.vogue.com.au/culture/lifestyle/everything-to-know-about-the-rise-of-the-cleanfluencer/news-story/876fc51058851876c162e0e8f539b834; Arwa Mahdawi, “Meet the ‘cleanfluencers’, the online gurus who like things nice and tidy,” The Guardian, 29th January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/29/meet-the-cleanfluencers-the-online-gurus-who-like-things-nice-and-tidy.

[20] Both of these trends have had dedicated TV shows in recent years: Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019) and W’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (2023).

[21] See Thomas Poell, David Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy, Platforms and Cultural Production (London: Polity Press, 2022).

[22] Most contemporary cleaning videos could be called “process films.” See Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

[23] Tithi Bhattacharya, “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 6-8. For canonical statements of social reproduction theory, all emanating from the Wages for Housework campaigns of the 1970s, see Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (London: Autonomedia, 1995); Selma James, Sex, Race and Class – The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012); Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).

[24] The most thorough discussion of this thesis remains Lisa Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

[25] Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish (London: Verso, 2024), 13.

[26] See, for example, Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction.

[27] This is, of course, a simplified account of the ideological mechanics at work. Political theorist Alyssa Battistoni alerts us to the ways that social reproduction theory is constitutionally over reliant on this ideological narrative to account for the systematic devaluation of the labour of social reproduction, at the expense of historically-contingent, economic explanations: “Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction,” American Political Science Review (2024). However, the “justificatory” role of ideology is undeniable: for an openly gender essentialist analysis of housework, see Nobel prize winner Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[28] “There is no outside to reproductive politics,” Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 4.

[29] Kristin Munro, “Social Reproduction Theory,” in Marx: Key Concepts, eds. Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024), 208.

[30] See Battistoni (2024).

[31] Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), 619. “My experience” amounts to over ten years of political organizing, mostly (but not exclusively) around work and housing, and (formatively) within and through a communist groupuscule based in the UK called Plan C.

[32] Jordy Rosenberg, “Becoming Hole (The Hiddener Abode),” World Picture 11 (Summer 2016).

[33] In recent years, political theorists like Arthur Jaffe and Tithi Bhattacharya have adopted a “social reproduction strike” framework, but I’m sticking with the tidier “social strike” for its parsimony, promiscuous application, and palpable connection to the tradition of “social unionism.” Arthur Jaffe, “From Social Reproduction Theory to Social Reproduction Strikes,” Socialism and Democracy 36, no. 1-2 (2022): 157–79; Tithi Bhattacharya, “Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History 21, no. 4 (2024): 117–129. For more on the “social strike,” see Maurilio Pirone, “The Strike Has Become Social: Paths of precarious mobilization in Italy,” Émulations 28 (2019). For a sense of its living usage and manifestations, peruse the Transnational Social Strike Platform’s website: https://www.transnational-strike.info/. Some prominent examples of the tactic include: the ongoing BDS (boycott/ divestment/ sanction) campaign against Israel; the Don’t Pay movement in the UK in 2022, protesting rising energy prices; the Corinthian student debt strike in the US, also in 2022; the “autoreduction” movement in Italy in the 1970s, which forced down bus fares through collective refusal to pay; and the “Ni una menos” movement against gender-based violence in Latin America, which began in 2016 and became a catalyst for the International Women’s Strike movement.

[34] Bhattacharya (2017), 18.

[35] Stuart Hall, Chas Chitler, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Red Globe Press, 2013) 130.

[36] This way of thinking is indebted to Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope: Volume One (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). An Adornian critique of extreme cleaning that connects its monetisation systems and ideological capture is entirely legitimate, but not the purview of this essay.

[37] Helen Wood and Bev Skeggs, “Spectacular morality: ‘Reality’ television, individualisation and the remaking of the working class,” In The Media and Social Theory, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (London: Routledge, 2008), 177-193.

[38] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2020).

[39] This concept is only tangentially (perhaps distractingly) related to the processes of “real” and “formal” subsumption discussed in Marx’s Capital: Volume One. Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community (London: Unpopular Books, 1988), 45.

[40] Carla of the Carla Project is a rare example of a Black creator in this space. A strong case can be made that Clean with Barbie and Auri Katariina mobilize whiteness (associations with Barbie dolls and Scandinavia respectively) in order to produce their brand of femininity.

[41] Solomon (2019), 79.

[42] Froio (2022).

[43] See Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/ 2 (1972): 81–100; Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family,” marxists.org (1920), https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm.

[44] Katrina Forrester, “Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework,” American Political Science Review (2022): 1-12.

[45] For more on Warhol’s utopianism, present in his “aim of liking things,” see Jonathan Flatley, “Collecting and Collectivity,” October 132 (2010), 72.

[46] See The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020).

[47] Central to the colonial imaginary is the separation of the world into those who can be affected and those who cannot be affected. See Denise Ferriera da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). The racialized and gendered distribution of the capacity to be affected is also explored in Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)

[48] Fife Free Cleaning, “Free cleaning gone wrong!,” YouTube, 30th November 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyJwCTgK-jU.

[49] Following Dean Spade’s definition of mutual aid, extreme cleaning is only “mutual-ish” because the videos don’t build collective power or a structural critique of the society that fails to meet our needs: Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (London: Verso, 2020).

[50] The Carla Project, “DECLUTTERING MY SISTER SHERRY’S HOUSE,” YouTube, October 15, 2023–June 30, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Qh5tZrDVc&list=PLObIS3fDDvwYZd6VxyWdN9gEEocrKSwmX&index=16.

[51] Giang Nguyen-Thu, “Hectic slowness: digital temporalities of precarious care from a Global South perspective,” Feminist Media Studies 22, no. 8 (2022), 1936-1950.

[52] The Carla Project, “decluttering doom bags and setting up a prepper pantry 🏡✨😍,” YouTube, January 31, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeqgM-25VbU&list=PLObIS3fDDvwYZd6VxyWdN9gEEocrKSwmX&index=11.

[53] The Carla Project, “DECLUTTERING MY SISTERS HOARDER GARAGE! This was INSANE😱😭🤯 (Ep. 3),” YouTube, November 5, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIAO4-Jz6GE&list=PLObIS3fDDvwYZd6VxyWdN9gEEocrKSwmX&index=3.

[54] The Carla Project, “We’re TIRED of decluttering but we still get it done! DECLUTTER WITH ME & MY SIS (Ep, 4),” YouTube, November 8, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNgykSXsm3Q&list=PLObIS3fDDvwYZd6VxyWdN9gEEocrKSwmX&index=4.

[55] The Carla Project, “Is hoarding hereditary? A sit down Q&A with my sister Sherry🏡,” YouTube, 20th February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dgjYv5Az8Q&list=PLObIS3fDDvwYZd6VxyWdN9gEEocrKSwmX&index=12.

[56] We might even read Capital, somewhat tendentiously, as Marx’s guide to identifying the ultimate target of communist struggle: amidst the ceaseless and dizzying “movement of value,” the capitalist is nothing more than “personified capital,” this epoch’s true big bad, driven by the “sole motivation… to appropriate more and more abstract wealth.” Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), 187, 127.

[57] Coline Cleans, “EXTREME Kitchen Cleaning to Avoid Eviction | Satisfying Transformation!,” YouTube, August 22, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_2l7I5A01w.

[58] The political application of the friend/enemy distinction comes from Carl Schmitt and finds its left-populist expression in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

[59] Clean with Barbie, “I Cleaned for FREE to Help a Mom Battling Child Protection💔,” YouTube, 22nd June 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPQ_zZWHAE&t=291s.

[60] See Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (New York, NY: Basic Book, 2022). See also conversations hosted by Haymarket Books: Mimi Abramovitz, Dr. Kirk “Jae” James, Premilla Nadasen, and Cameron W. Rasmussen, “Social Work, Racial Capitalism and the Struggle for Abolition,” YouTube, February 5, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTfZjC6Es_c; Joyce McMillan, Maleeka Jihad, Halimah Washington, and Michelle Grier, “Social Work and Abolishing the Family Regulation System,” YouTube, May 5, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2_LKmSz0Iw.

[61] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “From Military-Industrial Complex to Prison-Industrial Complex: An Interview with Trevor Paglen,” in Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (London: Verso, 2022).

[62] A recent video bucks this trend slightly. Auri admits that she’s been ill over the last few months, prompting a slew of messages imploring her to wear more personal protective equipment when she’s cleaning. Even this acknowledgment of frailty is somewhat hidden in the clean, and delivered between her standard sighs of pleasure and giggles of delight. In the following video, she reveals that her tiredness and poor health is, in fact, connected to good news: she’s pregnant. The dominance of joy is restored: Aurikatariina, “10 Year Renter Left Behind a HORRIFIC MESS!!!,” YouTube, 30th March 2025a, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pn2pqfn8Oo&t=481s; Aurikatariina, “I’M PREGNANT,” YouTube, April 3, 2025b, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc4FFQgCPCo&t=7s.

[63] Aurikatariina, “WHY I CLEAN FOR FREE,” YouTube, March 30, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuLWwiAPbaE.

[64] Aurikatariina (2025a).

[65] On exhaustion as the mal du siècle of our times, see Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (London: Repeater Books, 2024).

[66] Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 26-8. For an analysis of the contemporary politics of social reproduction through one of the great theorists of ambivalence, see Joanna Kellond, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022).

[67] For the presence of an “ambivalent range of emotions” in radical cycles of struggle, see Hannah Proctor, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (London: Verso, 2024).

[68] The confluence of Maoism, a countercultural practice of self-transformation, and feminist consciousness-raising is encapsulated in the famous penultimate line of the Combahee River Collective’s statement: “We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.” The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017).

[69] The idea of a “little red self-help channel” is adapted from the daydream of a “little red self-help book” in Richard Seymour, “The Cruelties of Self-Help Culture,” The New Statesman, February 1, 2022, https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/02/the-cruelties-of-self-help-culture.

[70] Helen Charman and Camille Barbagallo, “International Women’s Day: Why We Strike,” Verso Blog, March 6, 2020, https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/4584-international-women-s-day-why-we-strike?srsltid=AfmBOoqDnhGHxZvehwkabNF-TBfsPVeUEttVLstkdvpNF2OVQRtoj7C2.