To Örebro University

This paper examines the experiences of hotel housekeepers in Sweden, focusing on how their embodied identities, shaped by factors like gender, race, and migration background, influence and are influenced by their work. Placing the body at the centre of our research, we explore how embodied intersectionality is situated and contextually produced as lived experience in hotel workplaces. The way in which intersectional power dimensions are played out and performed is closely interconnected to bodies and the embodiment of roles, duties, identities and expectations inherent in the occupational context of the workplace. Through working participant observation, we explore the daily routines and bodily demands of housekeeping work, a low-status, feminised occupation predominantly filled by women and migrants. Our paper emphasises how embodied intersectionality operates within the workplace, revealing power dynamics, challenges, and subtle forms of resistance enacted by the workers. Our analysis illustrates that the ways in which hotel housekeeping work is carried out is shaped by expectations on what it means to be a housekeeper as much as it is by wider intersectional factors and embodied identities. We conclude by advocating for a greater emphasis on the working body in workplace studies to understand the nuanced realities of such marginalised labourers.