Cleaning Like Crazy: How Resistance Processes Lock in Problematic Practices and Damaging Overconsumption

Abstract

This study focuses on mundane consumption behavior from a practice theoretical perspective, and in particular, on household cleaning. Cleaning is an unquestioned part of everyday domestic life, usually carried out unreflexively. Over time, cleaning practices have become increasingly resource-intensive, contributing to overconsumption of water, and pollution through damaging chemicals. A critical ethnography of 10 Malaysian Chinese families unpacks the pre-formation, formation and lock-in of damaging cleaning practices, enriching understanding of how problematic practices are shaped by consumer culture and market forces. Three practice evolution drivers were identified: Diseases and paranoia (meanings), socio-cultural modernization (competencies), and technology modernization (materials). In response to perceptions of existential threat and aspirations to modernity, consumers both resisted and submitted to market forces; becoming locked in to repeating cycles of recontamination, resetting, and reinforcement. Reflecting wider social tensions, cleaning practices both co-constituted and challenged a toxic system, as the households continuously negotiated imagined boundaries of ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ inside and outside the home. Based on these insights, the study challenges accepted logics of policy intervention, calling for more ethical and situated responses to wicked problems.