Cleaning is conceptualized as taking the matter out of place. Something becomes dirty, and therefore in need of cleaning, when an extraneous element is introduced by an agent into a previously clean setting. Those metaphors are being used whenever one is faced with categorization tasks in which the conceptualizer decides which objects are allowed within the domain, and which have no place in it (and should thus be cleaned out). Cleaning can also take a meaning of being empty (Gvozdenović, 2020). Douglas (1966, 2002: 36) explains that dirt might take the form of many things, but the most common example is soil (or mud as its staining counterpart) which is brought into the house. Lizardo (2012:4) gives a note that soil is only dirt when it enters a setting (like a house) that is designated as a place that should be free from it. Dirt, therefore, has a contagious quality, since transporting matter out of place from the outside of a boundary to the inside requires an agent to make contact with the substance, thus becoming dirty him or herself. He or she must cause the object to make contact with the setting in which it is placed.

So, even if violence is absent from home, inequality is reproduced through the gendered nature of work around the home. In context of HOUSE and CLEANING, Simone de Beauvoir, famously said about housework: “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition. The clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over, and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present.” (de Beauvoir, 1949, 2005).