Abstract
In this article I review theoretical approaches that attend to the entanglements between affect and labor in late capitalism. I examine the concepts of affective, reproductive, emotional, and intimate labor, with a focus on what each model illuminates and obscures. While recognizing substantial differences among many forms of affective work, I highlight the relocation of the boundaries between production and reproduction, and public and private selves, as essential common themes among them. Bringing affect into labor changes the ways scholars address traditional debates and categories surrounding workers’ consent, alienation, and exploitation. The intersections of insights into labor and affect provide tools to research the contemporary transformations of work and the tensions and alignments between affective investments and political projects of emancipation from capitalist appropriation of labor.
Highlights
In the spring of 2017, subway cars in New York City displayed a series of ads by Fiverr, an “online freelance marketplace.” The campaign was called “In Doers We Trust” and it targeted freelance workers with the message that they should never stop pitching their ideas to potential clients—best conveyed in a video on the campaign website, of a woman checking her phone while having sex—nor ever take a break from work, as revealed in the ad where a woman updates her website from a toilet in a noisy bar
The ads illustrate the affective transformations of work in late capitalism: the myriad ways in which the boundaries between public and private selves, money and intimacy, pleasure and duty, are shifting and relocating
I touch upon the more recent concept of intimate labor and discuss what the grammar of intimacy brings to light in debates surrounding the body, labor, and affect
Summary
In this article I review theoretical approaches that attend to the entanglements between affect and labor in late capitalism. I examine the concepts of affective, reproductive, emotional, and intimate labor, with a focus on what each model illuminates and obscures. While recognizing substantial differences among many forms of affective work, I highlight the relocation of the boundaries between production and reproduction, and public and private selves, as essential common themes among them. Bringing affect into labor changes the ways scholars address traditional debates and categories surrounding workers’ consent, alienation, and exploitation. The intersections of insights into labor and affect provide tools to research the contemporary transformations of work and the tensions and alignments between affective investments and political projects of emancipation from capitalist appropriation of labor
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