Platformized domestic labor beyond technology: “Uncaring by design”?

Platform studies have increasingly emphasized everyday life as central to researching how gig labor platforms have seemingly evolved into urban infrastructures that connect the demand and supply of services. This paper takes the emphasis on everyday life seriously, locating the rise of platforms mediating domestic services within longer histories of feminized, migrantized, and informal domestic work in Continental Europe This encompasses the perspectives of platform clients and the undercurrents that emerge between workers and clients following the digital mediation of domestic services, specifically within the private sphere of the home. In doing so, we propose a shift in focus from digital platforms as such to the embodied and affective encounters and expectations that underpin platform-mediated domestic work. Against this backdrop, we approach marketplace platforms that mediate domestic cleaning services in view of interpersonal relationships between cleaners and clients, highlighting how platforms mediate gigs while relying on workers' subject positions shaped by migrantized, gendered, and classed embodiments. We zoom in on Austrian care platforms by combining empirical insights from interviews with cleaners and clients, which are presented as composite vignettes and supplemented with insights from interviews with platform managers. Moreover, we offer a critical feminist reading of the platformization of domestic service labor and the underlying power hierarchies. Hence, we build on the observations that domestic work has gained political momentum through its platformization and yet continues to be devalued along gendered, classed, and migrantized embodiments – and due to its location at home.