Mediating encounters between cleaners and clients: embodied power relations in platform-mediated domestic labour

While domestic service labour has long depended on informal referrals and personal contacts, an increasing number of digital labour platforms now offer a new, digital mode of matching households and cleaners, shaping how clients and workers encounter each other within both the digital space and the private space of the home. This paper examines how this new form of digital mediation through platforms influences the embodied encounters between cleaners and clients, focusing on the ways the digital mediation alters dynamics of trust, intimacy, and control for both cleaners and clients.

Platform-based cleaning services are often associated with convenience and stress relief for clients and flexible (additional) income opportunities for workers. Drawing on interviews with domestic cleaners and clients in Vienna (Austria), we argue that the digital mediation has distinct impacts on the way cleaners and clients interact. Cleaners' experiences range from interpersonal care to disrespect, microaggressions, and/or (sexual) violence. These experiences reveal how platform mediation shape the private home as a site where economic dependences, embodied care, and intersectional power asymmetries between cleaners and clients converge, as cleaners must navigate not only the emotional demands of intimate labour but also the surveillance and control embedded in both digital interfaces and domestic spaces.

To analyse these dynamics, we combine feminist political economy perspectives on platform labour – highlighting broader structures of exploitation and the devaluation of social reproduction – with micropolitical approaches that examine embodied relations between cleaners and clients. These relations unfold both through digital interfaces and during encounters within domestic spaces. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper shows how domestic service platforms are structured by, and actively reproduce, underlying power relations, which are simultaneously experienced, negotiated, and reproduced in cleaners' and clients' interactions, thereby spatialising the ongoing devaluation of domestic work in contemporary urban platform economies.

1 Introduction

When using a digital platform mediating domestic labour, cleaners and their clients often meet each other twice for the “first” time: first as filtered profiles, anonymised job postings, and chat messages online, and then again in person, in the clients' home. The introduction of platform intermediation into paid domestic labour is a recent development in central Europe, inserting itself into a sector historically shaped by intersecting gendered, racialised, and class-based hierarchies that position such work as low-status and invisible. Paid domestic labour in this context is predominantly performed by migrant women, often informally, for low wages, and largely excluded from formal labour protections (Duffy, 2007; Lutz, 2016; Sargeant, 2014; Triandafyllidou, 2016). What platforms newly contribute to these long-standing configurations is not simply a digital marketplace, but a change in how domestic work relations are approached, imagined, mediated and initiated (De Vita and Bertolini, 2026; Gruszka et al., 2022; Wiesböck et al., 2023). They create digital spaces that are not neutral infrastructures but socially structured environments where online interactions actively constitute offline encounters and vice versa (Bork-Hüffer and Yeoh, 2017; Elwood, 2021; Elwood and Leszczynski, 2018), embedding and reproducing power relations, social norms, and expectations within their very design.

In general, digital platform interfaces have become central to structuring how individuals meet, assess, and engage with one another (Koch and Miles, 2021). In the sphere of domestic cleaning, they reorganise the conditions under which encounters between cleaners and clients are initiated and negotiated. While trust, uncertainty, prejudice, entitlement, and unequal power relations are long-standing features of paid domestic labour, platforms introduce specific infrastructures through which cleaners and clients are matched, brought into contact and evaluate each other. In this process, domestic cleaning is increasingly organised through rapid, stranger-to-stranger matches, configuring how trust and risk are experienced across online and offline spaces. Platform interfaces thus help set the stage for expectations, prejudices, entitlements, and tensions that develop through online interactions and may carry into face-to-face encounters in the private home. This paper aims to examine how digital mediation through platforms influences embodied encounters between cleaners and clients, focusing on the ways the digital mediation alters dynamics of trust, intimacy, and control. To analyse these encounters, we argue, a dual lens is necessary to account for the structural as well as the affective dimensions of these encounters. Focusing on the specific characteristics of domestic labour and the home as a workplace, we embed our analysis in broader debates on social reproduction under patriarchal capitalism (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2020). Additionally, we examine how these structural inequalities manifest in everyday life by attending to the affective dimensions of domestic work (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2014).

Empirically, we draw on semi-structured interviews with cleaners and clients using domestic labour platforms in Vienna, Austria. We argue that understanding these encounters requires attention to three analytical moments: online encounters, where digital infrastructures prefigure trust and risk; in-person encounters in the home, where embodied negotiations of power take place; and post-encounter reflections, where cleaners and clients differently frame and rationalise these hierarchies. To illustrate these analytical moments, we present exemplary vignettes, each corresponding to one moment of encounter. Examining these moments side by side reveals how platforms reorganise visibilities, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities: cleaners become hyper-visible and individually accountable, while clients remain largely anonymous and unaccountable.

For the analysis and discussion of our empirical findings, we build on the concepts of affective governmentality and affective subjectivation (Penz and Sauer, 2020) to capture how platforms manage and intensify feelings of vigilance, trust, and comfort. Cleaners' strategies of professional self-presentation, self-protection, and emotional management emerge as affective forms of subjectivation, where structural risks are reframed as individual capacity. Clients, however, are encouraged to inhabit the role of intuitive selectors whose comfort and convenience serve as the platform's norm. Concluding, we argue that structural power relations along gendered, racialised, and classed lines are not incidental but constitutive features of platform-mediated domestic work, representing a reconfiguration rather than a break with the historical devaluation of reproductive labour under patriarchal capitalism. By demonstrating how platforms rearticulate these hierarchies through affective governmentality, we show how digital mediation has the potential to intensify exploitative relations, reshaping how capitalist relations are organised within the intimate realm of social reproduction at home.

2 Platform-mediated domestic cleaning

Labour platforms emerge as a seemingly innovative option for outsourcing domestic work, in addition to long-standing practices across central Europe such as arrangements in which cleaners and clients are introduced through existing personal networks, word-of-mouth referrals, bulletin boards or small offline agencies. Platforms often present themselves as combatting undeclared or informal work prominent in the domestic work sector by promising formalisation, convenience, and trust (Gerold et al., 2026; Pignolo, 2026; Strüver, 2024). Yet research consistently shows that domestic labour platforms largely reproduce informality and precarity, creating what Gruszka et al. (2024:9) term an “illusion of institutional visibility”, rather than substantial improvement or formalisation. Most domestic labour platforms continue to mediate informal socio-economic exchanges, as they either provide their services based on a paid subscription model (Lentz, 2026; Rodríguez-Modroño, 2024; Wiesböck et al., 2023) or hide the informality for clients by offering them convenient payment channels without actually employing the cleaners (Bor, 2021; Gerold et al., 2026). Both models force cleaners into self-employment without actually checking whether cleaners have registered as self-employed.

Domestic labour platforms operate as marketplace intermediaries that connect workers and clients through digital interfaces displaying worker profiles, client demands, and reputation systems such as ratings (Bor, 2021; Ettarfi, 2024; Gruszka et al., 2022). Clients search within what Pignolo (2026) terms a “catalogue” of cleaners: multiple profiles and service options are assembled in comparable form, inviting selection based on preferences. This catalogue effect enhances clients' power on the platform by centralising their choice, while forcing workers to work constantly on their individual visibility (crafting profiles, highlighting experience, and cultivating ratings) in order to stand out in a crowded marketplace (Ettarfi, 2024; Fetterolf, 2022; Floros, 2024; Pignolo, 2026; Piña et al., 2026). Workers must remain permanently available to secure enough bookings, while the algorithmic logic and unilateral rating systems pressure them to accept gigs under unfavourable conditions out of fear of losing future work (Keller, 2022). Ratings and reviews function as control mechanisms that induce emotional pressure, push unpaid labour (e.g. “extra” tasks to avoid bad reviews), and exert downward pressure on hourly rates (e.g. Gruszka et al., 2024; Kalemba et al., 2024; Keller, 2022, 2023; Wiesböck et al., 2023). Workers bear the administrative, fiscal, and legal responsibilities of self-employment while receiving little of the associated autonomy or economic benefits, often remaining without compensation for last-minute cancellations, sick leave, or robust protections against discrimination, harassment, or violence (Pulignano et al., 2023; Wiesböck and Radlherr, 2026). These negative effects are particularly acute for migrant and racialised workers, who constitute the majority in many location-based platform economies and whose labour trajectories are deeply shaped by legal status, citizenship, education, and migration histories (van Doorn, 2017, 2022; Floros, 2024; Orth, 2024; Yin, 2024).

Pulignano et al. (2023:11) illustrate how platforms limit “workers' knowledge about clients and the jobs while assigning them responsibility to perform knowledge work, finding out as much as they can about clients”. Therefore, workers invest significant time and effort into relationship building with clients for both self-protection and to secure stable income through recurring bookings (Kalemba et al., 2024; Lentz, 2026; Piña et al., 2026). Empirical research documents cleaners describing client misuse of platform functions both online and offline, from sexual harassment in digital spaces to verbal abuse and physical violence when working in new clients' homes (Pulignano et al., 2023; Wiesböck et al., 2023). Informal arrangements and irregular or insecure legal status further heighten vulnerability and limit avenues for reporting or accountability, producing structural impunity, especially for migrant women (van Doorn, 2017; Ticona and Mateescu, 2018). The (in)visibility framework developed by Gruszka and Böhm (2022) and extended by Pignolo (2026) helps to make sense of this: while workers are individually highly visible to clients through profiles and in person, they remain structurally invisible in terms of rights, protections, and recognition, and this double bind shapes their exposure to exploitation and harm. Therefore, relationships between workers and clients remain central to understanding lived realities in platform-mediated domestic labour. However, they have received limited academic attention so far (e.g. Gerold et al., 2026; Healy et al., 2020; Khan, 2026; Lentz and Stüver, 2026; Pignolo, 2026; Strüver et al., 2026). Findings by Gerold et al. (2026) suggest that a majority of clients turn to domestic labour platforms primarily due to time scarcity from work-life pressures and the appeal of convenience, alongside a perceived legal alternative to informality, yet many remain unaware of cleaners precarious self-employment and lack of protections. At the same time, Khan's (2026) research on care platforms shows that relational dimensions such as solidarity, mutuality, and attentiveness can matter greatly to clients' decisions, as they seek to balance care for self with concern for workers, for instance by valuing respectful interactions, continuity, or adjusting pay and conditions for “good” workers. While platform tools like ratings aid pre-selection and trust-building, clients frequently move beyond those. They screen for value congruence, often attributing choosing a specific cleaner to “gut feeling”, based often both on (physical) appearance in their online profiles as well as interactions on the platform and in person (Khan, 2026; Strüver et al., 2026). Pignolo (2026:7) highlights that many clients emphasise that “a crucial advantage of platforms is to increase employers' control over candidate selection, working conditions, or the handling of employment relationships”, which can include selectively rewarding workers, offering tips or perks, or moving off-platform, thereby fostering alliances and favourable ties amid enduring structural asymmetries (Pignolo, 2026; Gerold et al., 2026; Khan, 2026).

These relational dynamics shaping encounters between cleaners and clients, spanning from solidarity and care to disrespect, harassment, and violence, cannot be grasped through platform design or individual choices or relationships alone but demand attention to their structural embedding in domestic labour's devaluation under patriarchal capitalism (Barrial Berbén et al., 2026; Gerold et al., 2026; Rodríguez-Modroño et al., 2024; Yin, 2024) as well as the deeply relational side of these encounters unfolding in the intimate spaces of the home (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010, 2014; Kampouri, 2022). This dual perspective allows for a more comprehensive understanding of platform-mediated domestic labour. It bridges the structural inequalities inherent in the platform economy with the everyday relational practices shaping workers' and clients' encounters.

3 Structural and affective dimensions of domestic cleaning

The organisation of domestic cleaning as part of social reproduction is fundamentally shaped by patriarchal capitalism's core logic. Feminist political economy scholars have revealed how reproductive tasks (including cleaning, cooking, caring) are systematically rendered invisible, feminised, un(der)paid, and symbolically devalued as “women's work”. When paid, it is conceived as low-skilled drudgery or the last resort for the unqualified (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2020; Fraser, 2022; Weeks, 2011), and the labour is framed as servile, unskilled, and culturally inferior. In central European countries like Austria, a growing number of households rely on paid domestic cleaning labour (Sardadvar, 2019), which predominantly occurs without formal contracts, social security, or regulatory oversight, normalising precarity, low pay, irregular hours, and clients' power as acceptable for this “last resort” labour (Lutz, 2016; Sargeant, 2014).

Paid domestic labour, however, is not only shaped by its devaluation through patriarchy and capitalism, which are themselves spatially organised and reproduced through the gendered separation of private and public spheres. This division of labour constructs the private home as a space of intimacy and privacy, while also shaping relations of authority within it (Pratt, 2005; Thakkar and Smiley, 2024). The private home is therefore not merely the setting in which domestic labour takes place but a gendered space through which relations of labour, authority, intimacy, and privacy are constituted and negotiated. Home is often conceptualised as both a physical space and an intimate imaginary, imbued with meaning by its inhabitants and sociocultural and economic frames (Blunt and Dowling, 2022; Easthope, 2004). When private homes become workplaces, cleaners enter as “intimate Others” (Hall, 2019:777): they navigate deeply personal spaces imbued with clients' imaginaries of privacy, order, and propriety. For cleaners, this requires not only the physical labour of cleaning but emotional (dis)entanglements: managing visible disorder, handling personal belongings, and calibrating behaviour to unspoken household rules, all while maintaining a pleasant demeanour to fulfil (often unspoken) expectations (Chanamuto, 2022; Pignolo, 2023). The home's seclusion shields interactions from public scrutiny (Pratt, 2005), enabling clients to enforce expectations of servitude or discretion without accountability for their own behaviour towards the cleaner. Cleaners' encounters can thus range from care and mutual appreciation to subtle disrespect, microaggressions, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment (Motsei, 1990; Sargeant, 2014; Thakkar, 2024; Thakkar and Smiley, 2024), all reflecting the home's role as a site where broader inequalities materialise in embodied ways.

To capture these lived encounters between cleaners and clients, focusing on affective relations in domestic cleaning offers crucial insights (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010, 2014; Kampuori, 2022; Wasser, 2019), as paid domestic labour exists “in a paradoxical affective space; […] caught between humiliation/exploitation and care/intimacy” (Deumert, 2024:199). Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (2010, 2014), building on her research of the intimate socio-spatial relations in migrant domestic work, argues that feminised and racialised cleaning labour must be understood as symptomatic of embodied capitalism: domestic workers' bodies become key sites where exploitation, care, and dependency are negotiated and where the intersections of gender, race, and class shape work relationships. These are further complicated when considering that workers and clients are both affected and affecting during encounters related to paid domestic work. While both clients and cleaners experience these encounters individually, their affective character transcends the individual, exposing both parties to affective circuits that rest on multidimensional and dynamic power relations. We understand affect here not as internal psychological state or individual emotion but as the embodied capacity to affect and be affected that emerges through relations between people, material environments, and social practices (Röttger-Rössler and Slaby, 2018; Slaby, 2019; Wetherell, 2012, 2015). Affect unfolds through bodies but is shaped by the social, spatial, and material conditions in which encounters take place. Affective relations thus refer to the processes through which they are activated, negotiated, and transformed in encounters between people and their environments. This is particularly relevant to domestic cleaning, where cleaners and clients encounter one another through bodily presence and proximity within the intimate space of the home, entering these encounters from unequal social and spatial positions.

Building on this understanding of affect, the concepts of affective governmentality and affective subjectivation by Penz and Sauer (2020) provide our core analytical tools to understand these multidimensional power relations at play in platform-mediated domestic labour. Affective governmentality captures how affect functions as a social relation governing how people interact at the micro-level of encounters, while affective subjectivation describes how individuals become subjects through these affective relations. This means that affective governmentality draws attention to how power operates through affective relations, shaping how people relate to and conduct themselves towards others. Affective subjectivation, on the other hand concerns how individuals are shaped through these relations. Applied to domestic cleaning mediated by digital platforms, this framework reveals encounters between cleaners and clients, both on- and offline, as dynamic sites where structural inequalities of gender, class, migration and race inherent in the structural organisation of social reproduction materialise through affective relations: trust and mutual recognition at one end of the spectrum, discomfort, microaggressions, and violence at the other.

While traditional arrangements already embed these power asymmetries within intimate household spaces, platforms introduce digital infrastructures that preconfigure these encounters across online and offline domains, amplifying relational dynamics. To grasp these dynamics empirically, we draw on Slaby (2019), Wetherell (2012, 2015), and Wetherell et al. (2020), who developed a practice–theoretical approach to studying affect empirically. Building on the premise that affective activity is a form of social practice rather than an internal state, Wetherell's notion of affective–discursive practice highlights how affects are produced and negotiated in joint, inter-subjective activity, making clear that neither caring approaches to others nor disrespect or violence are simply “inside” individuals, nor linear, but relational and intra-active. Complementing this, Slaby (2019:63) emphasises that affective relations constitute relationality itself, functioning as “a subtle but powerful stabilizer of social demarcations” that are always socially and culturally mediated. The concept of affective practice (Röttger-Rössler and Slaby, 2018) similarly underscores affects's distributed, socio-materially situated character while maintaining individual agency and skilful engagement in view. This perspective enables us to “follow the actors” in cleaner–client encounters (Röttger-Rössler and Slaby, 2018:8), while attending to what exceeds their conscious intentions, capturing how structural inequalities become felt and enacted in everyday interactions.

4 Methodology and methods

Against this backdrop, our qualitative empirical strategy is designed to explore affective relations during platform-mediated initial encounters of cleaners and clients. Due to the deeply interpersonal and intimate nature of these interactions, we chose semi-structured interviews, of which we conducted 26 between 2023 and 2025 (21 with cleaners and 5 with clients) using the Austrian marketplace platforms betreut.at (https://www.betreut.at/, last access: 20 August 2026) and haushaltshilfe24.at (https://haushaltshilfe24.at/en, last access: 20 August 2026)¹ and focusing our analysis on cleaners' and clients' narrations of initial encounters with each other. The interviews lasted 45–120 min and were conducted in German or English either via WhatsApp video calls or in person at participant-chosen sites. The interviews were audio-recorded with consent, transcribed verbatim, pseudonymised, and coded in MaxQDA. Following the inductive approach to qualitative content analysis outlined by Kuckartz and Rädiker (2023), we developed codes iteratively by identifying recurring themes and patterns before refining and organising the codes into a structured coding system. This enabled us to identify core themes of everyday practices, embodied/affective relations, hiring expectations, and power relations.

The cleaners all identified as female and were between 24–59 years old. About one-third of them were born in Austria and the other two-thirds were migrants from both EU and non-EU states. At the time of the interview, over half of them had an Austrian passport, the other half held other EU citizenship or had legal residency via a visa for Austria. Cleaners were recruited via the platform's messaging tool with additional snowball sampling, and flyers in social institutions specifically for women. Given cleaners' precarious/informal conditions as migrant women, ethical considerations were paramount: informed consent, confidentiality, no legal/work status risks, participant-led pace/limits, and transparent off-platform research-identified contact. Cleaners were approached through the platforms using the first-author's real name and photograph, with the research purpose clearly stated, rather than being approached under the guise of a potential client to initiate the contact. This transparency was intended to reduce potential vulnerabilities for cleaners associated with platform surveillance or sanctions (Bor, 2022; Floros, 2024; Orth and Baum, 2024). Interviews opened with biographical questions on work histories, care responsibilities, and first platform/client encounters. To remain attentive to intersecting hierarchies without fixing participants in predefined identity categories (Misra et al., 2021; Mollett and Faria, 2018), the interview guide focused on concrete situations, e.g. client negotiations, platform support interactions, and welfare/migration dealings, inviting cleaners to narrate how gender, migration, class, family status, or legal position became relevant and overlapped in practice. When domestic violence arose unprompted, we prioritised participant wellbeing through affirming, empathetic listening focused on their experiences, offering to pause/stop the interview or shift topics rather than probing for distressing details (Ellsberg and Heise, 2002); affected transcript sections were subsequently removed from analysis. Registering and naming the occurrence of patriarchal violence suffices without extractivist detailing that risks capitalising on trauma, as critiqued by feminist and decolonial scholars (Haraway, 2016; Noxolo, 2009).

The five client interviews explored their expectations, hiring practices, and experiences of domestic labour within private homes. Including clients was crucial for grasping the triangular platform–cleaner–client relationship and understanding how labour relations are negotiated across interconnected online and offline spaces of platform mediation. Recruiting clients proved the most challenging aspect of fieldwork: despite multiple calls for participants shared through social media outlets, the platform's messaging tool, neighbourhood forums, and local community groups, responses were minimal. This possibly reflects, among other factors, the time pressures and moral ambivalence around informal hiring that Gerold et al. (2026) and Pignolo (2026) identify as key motivations for platform use in the first place. Ultimately, the five participants who agreed to an interview were recruited through our extended personal networks or via direct messages through the platforms. All were white and middle-class, holding Austrian or German citizenship (one was a long-term migrant from outside the EU). Despite our small sample, these households all fall in the category of middle and upper class urban households, who, statistically, have a higher tendency to outsource their domestic labour (Enste and Anger, 2024; Shire et al., 2017). Two interviews were with multiple individuals from one household, two with individuals living alone, and one speaking on behalf of himself, his partner, and their children. Because of the limited number of interviews with clients, our analysis of the material is necessarily exploratory and does not support generalisations about clients as a broader group; rather, it provides situated insights into how clients might experience and negotiate platform-mediated domestic labour.

To research affective relations empirically, we turn to the practice–theoretical approach outlined above, drawing on Slaby (2019) and Wetherell (2012, 2015), in which affective activity is treated as distributed social practice. Wetherell conceptualises affective–discursive practices as joint and intra-active processes, while Röttger-Rössler and Slaby (2018) emphasise the socio-material situatedness of affective practices while retaining a role for individual agency. Building on these approaches, we traced how structural inequalities become felt and enacted in cleaner–client encounters beyond conscious intentions. To illuminate these affective relations, we focused exclusively on initial encounters, first, online encounters; second, offline encounters in the private home, since after these initial encounters the specific impact of platform mediation becomes less graspable, shifting toward more traditional relationship building based on individual sympathy and familiarity. Additionally, we draw on post-encounter reflections by both cleaners and clients during interviews with us, to display their sense-making of these hierarchies coherently.

Findings are presented across the three analytical moments (online encounters, offline home encounters, post-encounter reflections). We chose to present an exemplary vignette² for each analytical moment, illustrating dialogue, context, and embodied and tonal cues to preserve relational dynamics, narrative flows, and ambivalences. Further, the empirical illustrations explore how the affective force of an interview incited new trajectories of thought and positioned us, the researchers, as entangled in knowledge production (Bissell, 2023, 2026), shaped by our own embodied and social positions as white female geographers. Our feminist and care-full approach to society and to research informed our reading (including potential oversights) of the interview dynamics, as well as our entangled participation in the production of meaning during this research process (Faria and Mollett, 2016; Militz et al., 2020).

5 Empirical findings: affective relations across online and offline encounters

Digital platforms transform domestic cleaning into rapid, stranger-to-stranger matches, configuring trust and risk across online profiles, messages, and in-home encounters. In what follows, we examine these encounters in three analytical moments: online interactions, initial meetings in the home, and subsequent reflections in our interviews. For each moment, we introduce an exemplary vignette in which a cleaner or client recounts such a situation, foregrounding how they experience and interpret it. Cleaners and clients navigate these moments amid asymmetrical visibilities and safeguards, revealing how platforms intensify pre-existing hierarchies in intimate labour. Expressions placed in quotation marks within the empirical analysis, including the vignettes, are verbatim formulations from participants. All of the following interpretations in Sect. 5 refer to insights from our interviews only and are not general statements.

5.1 Online encounters: digital pre-configurations of trust and risk

During our interview, Klara recounts an evening last week. “My phone pinged with a notification while I brought my kids to bed”. Every evening and often during the day, she checks the cleaning platform for new messages, hoping it's a friendly message. Today it only says “Hello, Cleaning on Thursday? Price”. She tells me that she kind of needs some extra cash; her kid needs a new winter coat. “So, my detective work starts”, she tells me, starting with the job posting that is attached to that message. She does not have much luck: It's just the standard template provided by the platform, saying how big the apartment is and how much they are willing to pay. The price is ok, so she messages them back, trying to get more information about them through texting with them … When telling this she sounds tired. When we return to the topic of her own online presence, she shows understanding for the number of details requested, as she will enter clients' private home, she just thinks “it's a bit frustrating clients don't have to be as transparent as I have to be” (Vignette 01 – Interview with Klara, Platform-Mediated Domestic Cleaner, 2024).

Cleaners describe online interactions as a high-stakes filtering ritual. They dedicate entire evenings to sifting through incoming platform messages, which range widely in tone and intent. Friendly personal messages that include the client's name, express gratitude, and maintain a respectful tone, signal a potentially good client, as do specific instructions about preferred cleaning products and reasonable timing requests. At the other extreme lie demand-style short requests that fail to address the cleaner by name or offer basic politeness, suspicious offers of unusually high wages that hint at ulterior motives, such as direct requests for sexual favours such as cleaning in underwear, providing massages, or other exploitative propositions. During our interviews, cleaners themselves often frame these kinds of messages as symptomatic of a broader disrespect and devaluation of domestic work and those who perform it. Many explicitly link lack of greeting, failure to use their name, or the assumption that they might be available for sexualised services to the perception of cleaning as low-status work that does not merit basic courtesy or clear boundaries. In their profiles, they actively try to counter these dynamics. They emphasise professional experience, reliability, and specific competencies to signal that their work requires professionalism, knowledge, and care rather than being an unqualified helper. However, cleaners emphasise that they never know if these strategies of aiming to fulfil the unwritten ideal of a domestic cleaner in their profile or trying to find out about potential clients works out, they have to take the chance, or risk, of meeting them in person.

Clients approach the same digital interactions with more ease. Our findings align with Gerold et al. (2026), Pignolo (2026), and Khan (2026), suggesting that clients often do not have a distinct vision of the perfect cleaner but arguing that finding the right cleaner has to do with “gut feeling”: an intuitive sense sparked by profiles that evoke trustworthiness and compatibility. During our interviews, clients describe scrolling through overwhelming numbers of profiles on the platform, pausing at those that feel personal and warm rather than impersonal or template-like. Profiles, including photos, that “radiate domesticity” stand out as promising fits for their household space. Many clients explicitly argue in interviews that they “do not mind” a cleaner from a different country of origin and insisting this informs none of their selection criteria. Yet closer inspection reveals other markers of difference associated with being a migrant, such as language skills or cultural familiarity, subtly prove important to clients during our interviews, favouring profiles suggesting effortless communication and mutual understanding over formal qualifications or explicit nationality mentions.

Both cleaners and clients agree on politeness and clarity in these digital exchanges as early indicators of trust and smooth future collaboration. Cleaners value respectful tone and detailed specifications as reassurance of professional treatment, while clients interpret prompt, attentive replies as evidence of reliability and household compatibility. However, reflection on the stakes of these online encounters emerges strikingly one-sided in the interviews. Cleaners frequently display pragmatic understanding for the need to expose extensive personal information in their profiles, recognising that clients require reassurance before granting access to intimate domestic spaces filled with personal belongings, family routines, and unspoken expectations. Clients, by contrast, rarely reflect on or question this imbalance during our interviews. They treat their own anonymity as unremarkable, appearing only through generic job postings based on platform templates, without photos, personal details, or ratings, or even displaying irritation when asked about it during the interview with us. They also do not acknowledge the very real stakes cleaners face when entering a stranger's home for the first time.

5.2 Initial encounters: threshold crossings and embodied power negotiations

During our interview, Anna recounts their first cleaner encounter, starting with pre-cleaning the flat. “We tidied toys and chaos everywhere so she wouldn't judge us”, she tells me, admitting her apprehension about the disruption of the privateness of her home. Natalia was the first cleaner they approached through the platform; Anna describes her as confident: she asked “where does this go?”, and took notes in her little notebook, sorted kids' mess with unobtrusive warmth, deep-cleaned kitchen and bath ideally. “Amazing from day one”, Anna says smiling; they often shared coffee and conversation. But Natalia had to resign to care for her mother. Because using a platform worked so well the first time, Anna and her husband returned to the platform but their next attempts failed: one scolded “too messy here, I can't even clean”, making Anna feel judged in her own home; another just wiped superficially, lacking the thoroughness Anna expected. “We don't want much”, she tells me during our conversation; they do not care if she is an immigrant or anything, as long as she cleans well, speaks proper German and is nice. “I don't know why this is so hard so find”. When telling me this, Anna sounds exhausted and annoyed; it is “like blind dates that keep failing” (Vignette 02 – Interview with Anna and Lukas, Platform Clients, 2025).

Both cleaners and clients enter the initial encounters in person carrying “stranger danger” (Ahmed, 2000:32): a mutual wariness of the unknown person. This apprehension influences their approach from the outset, both monitoring each other closely during the first encounter. One of the cleaners we interviewed repeatedly emphasises during the interview, “You never know what's coming”, capturing the pervasive uncertainty that frames these first meetings for cleaners. Many of them describe arriving with deliberate defensive strategies for these initial encounters: sharing their live locations with family or friends or bringing family members like their children. The vulnerability of being in a stranger's home for the first time is felt acutely, enhanced by the disrespectful or inappropriate messages they have often received from other potential clients on the platform or, in some cases, negative experiences with previous platform clients. Clients' apprehension is more centred on domestic disruption and competence rather than physical endangerment. Some describe an uncomfortableness of letting a stranger into their private space, fearing disruption, disorder, or theft. As described in the vignette above, another client reports cleaning in advance so the cleaner would not judge them or rather, the state of their home. Like cleaners, clients emphasise embodied tone as key: reciprocal smiles and fluid small talk create flow, mismatched energies generate friction.

When interacting with each other for the first time, both cleaners and clients from our sample agree on gestures as bridges: clients offering coffee or showing interest in the cleaner, cleaners complementing the home or interacting with pets or children. However, not all encounters are so positive. Clients report moments where they feel the cleaner is not cleaning how they clean themselves, failing to integrate into uncommunicated household standards, where the cleaner is lacking the warmth or the unobtrusiveness they imagined from their platform profile. These moments, where the cleaner does not fulfil initial expectations or shows signs of tardiness, like being late or failing to take off their shoes when entering the apartment, are noted mentally and often contribute to the decision if they will ask the cleaner to come back.

Cleaners, on the other hand, recount moments where clients hover in doorways, eyes flicking between laptops and the cleaners' movements, leaving the cleaner uncertain whether her work technique or she as a person faces scrutiny in this situation. They describe the initial encounters as moments of being constantly watched, while they themselves are constantly on the lookout for signs of threat or danger, without the client spotting this mistrust. These moments can be quite subtle: clients pretending not to understand their accent or meticulously pointing out small oversights like water drops on a mirror. They can also be quite violent, with clients screaming at cleaners for small misunderstandings or withholding wages if the cleaner does not perform to their standards. These tensions further cumulate in physical and/or sexual violence, including non-consensual comments and touching, blocked exits until explicit propositions are fulfilled, leaving cleaners feeling momentarily “at [the client's] mercy” despite their meticulous pre-scanning and defensive precautions. These dynamics rest on profound power imbalances: clients exercise economic control over work agreements and wages, spatial authority within their private homes, and de facto impunity since cleaners possess limited information about them for meaningful accountability, amplifying vulnerability when subtle tensions escalate into overt harm.

5.3 Reflecting encounters: perception of hierarchies

During our interviews with clients, there is always a section where I get nervous. When I ask them to reflect on power dynamics and hierarchies in their relationship with cleaners, the atmosphere often shifts uncomfortably. With Carsten, he just laughs and says: “Of course there are power hierarchies: I can afford a cleaner and she probably can't. And you only work as a cleaner when you really need the money”. He pauses, then adds more earnestly: “I know platform conditions are precarious. That's why I tried supermarket flyers first but got no replies, so the platform was necessary”. He tells me about their relationship with their current cleaner, Tanja, who migrated from Czech Republic, but that her migration background is nothing he pays attention to, as they “just clicked right away, have the same humour, we are on the same wavelength”. He acknowledges that migration trajectories play an important role in cleaning work, yet argues this is just part of the business. He describes “gut feeling”, sympathy, and communication skills as key factors for finding a cleaner on the platform. Tanja immediately understood their humour while an earlier Arabic-speaking cleaner made interaction impossible because “we really couldn't communicate at all” (Vignette 03 – Interview with Carsten, Platform Client, 2025).

Asking to reflect on the on- and offline encounters in our interviews, both cleaners and clients acknowledge the underlying power relations, though to a vastly different extent as well as from divergent vantage points. Clients predominantly express acute awareness of their economic privilege, e.g. being able to outsource their domestic labour. While one of them describes unease about using a platform for this outsourcing, as he has heard or read about the precarious working conditions, multiple clients reported trying it the “old-fashioned way” with flyers or asking around but noted that it did not work out for them. Similar to findings by Gerold et al. (2026), clients in our interviews justify using the platform as a reluctant necessity amid time constraints like (new) parenthood, intense demands from their own wage labour, or because they cannot clean as accurately as they would like it. Other intersecting relations shaping domestic cleaning beside class, especially gender, race, and migration, were rarely addressed by clients, revealing a selective reflexivity that foregrounds economic privilege while side-lining other, often intersecting, embodied features of identity. The gendered disrespect and sexualised harassment some cleaners documented in the interviews was absent from the accounts of the five clients interviewed. This absence may rest on the small sample, but it may also be related to the social stigma surrounding experiences of harassment and the resulting reluctance to disclose such experiences in research interviews. Race and migration status were often either not mentioned or outright denied as shaping the client–cleaner relation, with interviewees insisting on “colourblind” or meritocratic logics. Yet markers for these hierarchies like language skills, cultural knowledge, or veiled preferences for certain nationalities based on stereotypes surfaced repeatedly in client interviews as deciding factors for the success of the work agreement, illuminating how racialised and migrant filters operate implicitly in profile selections and rebooking decisions but also in how people interact with each other.

The assertion of many clients that they do not hold prejudices based on gender, race, migration, and/or class erased the lived reality of many cleaners and disregards the intersectional power relations shaping both the cleaners' experience and the intra-active relationship between cleaners and clients. Cleaners thus invest extensive emotional labour in masking accents or cultural differences, performing warmth under scrutiny, and adapting to unstated household norms just to secure re-bookings and avoid economic fallout. While cleaners reflect on these hierarchies not as specifically platform-bound but as inherent to domestic cleaning, they attribute the heightened vulnerability, especially to sexual harassment, to their hyper-visibility forced by the platform as well as the lack of safeguarding and control by the platform, e.g. not performing any kind of vetting of clients and requiring cleaners to appear via detailed profiles with pictures while clients simply post standardised job offers.

6 Concluding discussion: affective governmentality and subjectivation in platform-mediated domestic labour

Turning to affect sharpens our analysis of platform-mediated domestic cleaning by distinguishing how platforms shape pre-existing power relations through specific mechanisms of affective governmentality and subjectivation. Classed, gendered, racialised, and migratory hierarchies have long structured domestic cleaning encounters, manifesting as economic precarity and embodied power hierarchies shaping encounters between cleaners and clients. Platforms do not invent these hierarchies, but following Penz and Sauer's (2020) conceptualisation, we argue that platforms introduce a specific layer of affective governmentality to domestic cleaning by re-coding pre-existing power relations into digital infrastructures that regulate affective relations as mechanisms of control and exploitation. In our empirical material, this becomes most obvious in how platforms frame whose experiences and well-being are prioritised. The platforms' asymmetrical visibility for cleaners and clients creates an uneven playing ground, more uneven than it already is when looking at the structural organisation of domestic cleaning, where clients in most cases hold more societal and economic status than the cleaners they pay. The platforms' structure therefore forces cleaners to craft their profiles that fit dominant imaginaries of the “good” cleaner, performing warmth and domesticity through chat messages and during the initial encounters with new clients, where they enter homes that were selected based on minimal, often templated information. Additionally, suggestive messages (and similar in-person experiences) circulate fear and normalise hypervigilant triage as normal conduct when using a platform for many cleaners. This modulation distinguishes platforms from traditional arrangements in which cleaners and clients are introduced through existing personal networks. This is a specific dimension of platform-mediated domestic labour, not because trust, uncertainty, or stranger-to-stranger encounters are exclusive to platforms but because digital infrastructures organise visibility, information, matching, and evaluation in particular ways, without providing equivalent means of accountability or protection.

Affective governmentality, according to Penz and Sauer (2020), targets pre-cognitive intensities and relational capacities to steer from a distance. Platforms, in this regard, enforce and intensify cleaners affective subjectivation by habituating cleaners to experience their fear and vigilance as individual affective self-management: necessary entrepreneurial skills rather than responses to structurally produced risk. Affective subjectivation then involves the micro-processes through which subjects internalise power hierarchies through affective relations, framing message triage, live-location sharing, and pre-emptive blocking not as reactive precautions against platform-enabled exploitation but as proof of their professional capacity and relational competence, essential for securing ratings, re-bookings, and economic survival. This effectively recasts structural asymmetries as personal challenges to overcome. Clients' experiences, by contrast, are engineered through abundance of both cleaners and information available about them, suggesting finding “the right fit” as easy and convenient, even for clients who feel tension about outsourcing their domestic work. Yet, as Anna's vignette illustrates, these promises of effortless matching are often not fulfilled in practice, generating frustration with the platform and, at times, disappointment directed at cleaners. However, the platform allows clients to display their demands, both regarding the cleaning itself as well as towards the cleaner without constraints, even though some might be unreasonable. Compared to non-platform mediation via neighbours, friends, or local notice boards, the social embeddedness of both clients and cleaners, often with shared social contacts, where existing social contacts may create reputational ties (Khan, 2026; Pignolo, 2023), platform-mediated encounters rest on fewer interpersonal constraints on behaviour and entitlement (for both cleaners and clients). On platforms, by contrast, clients appear primarily as demand signals in a marketplace. They are encouraged by the platform design to inhabit the position of chooser and evaluator: scrolling past dozens of profiles, “trying out” cleaners, and relying on “gut feeling” as legitimate selection tool. This fosters affective subjectivation parallel to that of cleaners: clients internalise comfort and intuition as natural, silencing their unease (about precarity or power asymmetries) with gestures like tips or coffee that reaffirm ethical self-positioning without reciprocity or accountability. Slaby's (2019) emphasis on how interactions are shaped by underlying affective relations, even against peoples stated beliefs, is instructive here: clients in our research often disavow prejudice. Yet when we examine how they narrate their “gut feelings”, these frequently align with established hierarchies around language, cultural knowledge, nationality, migration trajectories, and appearance. Clients in our research tend to favour cleaners they feel they have something in common with, most often language but also a shared cultural understanding of domesticity. The platform amplifies this by foregrounding certain cues, like cleaners' photos or self-descriptions, and hiding others such as clients' own histories, reputations, intentions, and their power to harm. Affective governmentality, in this context, lies in making clients' comfort and intuition the implicit standard on the platform, while rendering cleaners' fear and exposure largely invisible.

Concluding, we argue that approaching platform-mediated domestic work through the narratives of both cleaners and clients illuminates how platforms shape not only the experience of finding the right cleaner or the right client but also the relational conditions under which these encounters unfold. Focusing on affective relations in cleaner–client encounters helps us see how economic, social, and cultural dimensions are intra-active, mutually constitutive rather than separate layers, manifesting on the embodied level of individual encounters. It allows us to see the implicit yet relational consequences of platform mediation, which remain under-addressed in the dominant debates on platforms' algorithmic management and workers' exploitation (e.g. Altenried, 2024; van Doorn, 2017; Floros, 2024; Yin, 2024). Understanding affective relations as governing allows us to grasp how platforms rearticulate and enforce structural power relations on the embodied level. Rather than prescribing behaviour directly, platforms govern subjects affectively: they make vigilance, self-discipline, and deference appear as a professional attitude, while comfort and evaluative distance acquire the status of legitimate user experience. In doing so, they render both power and information asymmetry ordinary, translating social hierarchies into embodied conduct and expectation. Platforms thereby extend control beyond the contractual and economic, by reconfiguring how existing relations and hierarchies of control are experienced and negotiated. Situating these affective encounters within the framework of feminist political economy shows that digital platforms intensify the historical devaluation of reproductive labour by embedding it in new technological affordances. We argue that structural power relations along gendered, racialised, and classed lines are not incidental but constitutive features of platform-mediated domestic work, representing a digital reconfiguration rather than a break with the historical devaluation of reproductive labour under patriarchal capitalism. Through the information asymmetry built into platform design, digital mediation has the potential to intensify power hierarchies and exploitative relations.