Intersectional (in)visibility and forms of (de)professionalization: the case of migrant domestic platform workers in Italy

This paper adopts a feminist and intersectional perspective to investigate platform-mediated domestic work in Italy. While existing scholarship has extensively analysed classed, gendered and racialized hierarchies in traditional domestic labour, the growing role of digital platforms in mediating these work arrangements deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. Focusing on the experiences of migrant cleaning workers in Milan, this study contributes to the debate on domestic platform work by interrogating the relationship between (de)professionalization and (in)visibility. First, we show how digital labour platforms, while claiming to enhance visibility and professionalization, often reproduce existing intersectional inequalities through mechanisms of legal stratified access to platform work, gendered, racialized and classed division of labour, as well as social invisibility. Second, we challenge the victimization narrative of workers, highlighting not only the lived forms of oppression but also the individual and collective agency actively exercised by platform domestic workers. By adopting an intersectional approach, we then critically challenge the dominant narratives of professionalization and increased visibility related to platform work, illuminating the complex entanglements of oppression and agency in contemporary digital economies.