Dirt management: cleanliness, hygiene, and childcare in the United States
Creators: name: Han, Tsai-Yen
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: This dissertation studies the social construction of child hygiene in the United States. I ask how a hygienic child is possible? I explore the ideas of clean and dirty through the contexts of childcare and analyze how the relevant social actors—state governments, daycare teachers, and parents—participate in the social construction, distribution, reinforcement, and negotiation of the meanings of clean and dirty under the contested hygiene discourses created by the entrance of the hygiene hypothesis in a field long dominated by the germ theory. I use archival analysis, ethnography, and in-depth interviews to address the following research questions: What are hygiene discourses using to govern childcare providers and child-caring activities? What are hygiene codes passing down to preschool children in daycare centers? How do social positions shape parental understandings and practices of child hygiene?First, I examine the hygiene regulations, standards, and guidelines that the New Jersey state government uses to govern daily childcare practices in daycare centers and preschools. At the level of biopower and governmentality, I show that the state hygiene regulations organize the daycare facilities in a hygienic way as well as shape the daily childcare schedule and the ways daycare teachers conduct childcare activities. In compliance with state hygiene requirements, childcare centers become the primary hygiene institutions that carry out hygiene discourses, and daycare teachers become disciplined hygiene workers who embody the hygiene standards and spend more than half of their time and energy on cleaning, sanitation, and disinfection. Second, at the level of subject formation, I show the dual roles of daycare teachers as public health agents who distribute hygiene discourses and as the subjects who are constructed, formed, and produced through the discursive formation of knowledge under the state hygiene discourses and regulations. Daycare teachers act as key socialization agents who pass down the (state-regulated) hygiene norms to the young children and produce hygienic children in preschool classrooms. Children from different racial/ethnic and cultural backgrounds receive the same codes and messages of hygiene and cleanliness, including the timing, sequence, duration, and tempo of hand hygiene; the spatial deployment of clean and dirty; and the hygienic methodology behind of body usage, respiratory hygiene, wearing outdoor shoes in the classrooms, table manners, and not sharing food. Third, I show that for American-born parents (mothers), different social positions, including socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and medical histories, lead to different understandings of the meanings of dirt and cleanliness, and push them to manage child hygiene differently. Under the “intensive hygienic motherhood” discourse, mothers are expected to constantly clean, sanitize, and disinfect places, equipment, and objects children would use and touch; patiently and gently clean, wipe, and wash young children’s bodies; and keep children away from exposures to dirt and germs. I conceptualize two ideal types, hygiene policer and immunity builder, each with their distinct management, attitudes, and understandings of cleanliness, dirt, germs, childhood, and health. I analyze the social structures behind the hygiene policers and immunity builders. Last, I focus on the non-White immigrant parental (maternal) experiences. I examine how immigration status plays a role in shaping immigrant parental (maternal) understandings of child hygiene and their dirt management strategy. I show that the ways of dirt management immigrant parents choose to use are associated with their experiences of hygiene surveillance and identity work. Whether immigrant parents choose to be hygiene policers or immunity builders, they may be labeled by native-born Americans as “non-American,” “foreigners,” or “inadequate parents.” I find that non-White immigrant parents (mothers) accept, reject, appropriate, and negotiate the American hygiene discourses to defend their parental (maternal) and ethnic identities as well as their daily negotiations of a sense of belonging and othering in the United States.