Mrs Hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework: Scouring away the crisis?

This article extends sociological and feminist accounts of housework by examining the social significance of the rise of the ‘cleanfluencer’: online influencers who supply household cleaning and organization tips and modes of lifestyle aspiration via social media. We focus on ‘Mrs Hinch’; aka Sophie Hinchliffe from Essex, the ‘homegrown’ Instagram star with 4.1 million followers who shares daily images and stories of cleaning and family life, and has a series of bestselling books, regular daytime TV appearances and supermarket tie-ins. We argue that, within neoliberal culture, housework is now often refashioned as a form of therapy for women’s stressful lives: stresses that neoliberalism and patriarchy have both generated and compounded. The argument is developed through three sections. First, we locate Mrs Hinch in relation to longer classed, gendered and racialized histories of domestic labour and the figure of the ‘housewife’, and the re-writing of domestic narratives to find new ways of ensuring women’s willingness to participate in unpaid domestic labour. Second, we analyse the contradictions of cleanfluencing as a form of ‘digital identity labour’ representing offline housework, which in this case is precarious and classed. Finally, drawing these themes together, we show how ‘Hinching’ recasts housework as part of a neoliberal therapeutic promise to ‘clean away’ the instabilities, anxieties and threats of contemporary culture.

(Dis)Obedient Daughters and Devoted Wives

This chapter charts the life cycle of actresses in the American starring system, highlighting the common gendered features of starring for girls and women, including the gendered frameworks found in promotional and biographical materials. This chapter returns to Anne Brunton Merry, Agnes Holman, Clara Fisher Maeder, and Lydia Kelly while introducing Ellen Johnson Hilson, Frances Denny Drake, and Elizabeth Blanchard Hamblin. Together their stories illustrate how the careers of women and girls were yoked to the corporate interests of the nuclear family in ways that constrained the terms of their careers. New forms of publicity, which expanded in the 1820s and 1830s, mobilized a gendered politics of respectability that was built around starring women’s family identities but that reframed their role as family earners through sentimental domestic narratives.

Gothicizing Domesticity – The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allan Poe

It is critical common knowledge that domestic narratives and the structure of traditional domesticity are subverted in Gothic fiction (Smith 2013). The household and its apparent security are threatened from within by unknown supernatural forces. What seems familiar becomes upsetting, strange and ‘unfamiliar’. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat” give comparable views on American domesticity, both questioning two important aspects of domestic life (family and a blissful household). The two writers create a mad discourse in which the inexplicable and the uncanny infiltrate into reality and the sentimental domestic narrative is undermined.

Value-oriented aspects of EU-isation: the case of the Balkans

In the case of the Balkans, Monika Eriksen shows us that EU-isation is dependent on how far it accords with domestic narratives. Croatia and Serbia experience it differently to other Balkan states, for example. This chapter raises the question of how far EU-isation can fundamentally change values and promote an EU-defined European identity when it confronts other local identities such as Balkan identity