‘Entrepreneur of yourself’: singing as female music labour in the Greek popular music scene

Building Online Academic Community: Reputation Work on Twitter

This article studies three “mommy blogs,” online platforms catering to (in these cases) American mothers of various sub-demographics, through an affective labor framework. Using digital labor and Althusserian subject formation to inform my reading of the common rhetorical gestures made in these blogs, I ask how they conceive of their readership and contributors. I argue that mommy blogs should be understood as sites of digital labor because of the ways in which their publishing conditions and rhetorics establish labored expectations of the “mommy” subject. Contestations of the nature of affective labor in motherhood are reflected by anxieties around digital labor, which play out via ideological conflicts that manifest rhetorically in the blogs under discussion. This analysis is informed by affect theory, Althusser and Butler’s work on subject formation, and the existing feminist literature on digital labor and the mommy blog.

Digital labor is a complex term, spanning a range of phenomena from digital transformations of paid work, to creative labor in digital media industries, to the exploitation of user data, to mineral extraction, manufacturing, and electronic waste disposal. A shared feature of these forms of labor is the extension of unpaid working hours, precarious labor conditions, and the blurring of labor and leisure. These conditions are described as the “feminization” of labor and also correspond with features associated with unpaid domestic work, particularly as theorized by Marxist feminists. Digital labor can be usefully interrogated using feminist concepts, even though the gendered qualities of this work remains under‐researched.

As Ursula Huws has written, digital labour is 'difficult to conceptualise' because the internet creates new styles of labour: it not only traffics far more in the immaterial, it is also arrayed along new axes of production, new forms of compensation, and new forms of gendering and racialisation. (1) It is this kind of labour that interests me. I am specifically interested in the hidden and often-stigmatised and dangerous labour performed by women of colour, queer and trans people, and racial minorities who call out, educate, protest, and design around toxic social environments in digital media. Social media platforms benefit from the crowd-sourced labour of internet users who, with varying degrees of gentleness or force, intervene in racist and sexist discourse online. This labour is uncompensated by wages, paid instead by affective currencies such as 'likes', followers, and occasionally, acknowledgement or praise from the industry. Cheap female labour is the engine that powers the internet. Some of this labour occurs in the fabrication laboratories and electronic assembly plants in East Asia where almost all of the world's chips and digital devices are produced. Women of colour are the majority of this workforce, as has been the case since the industry's early days. Over a thousand indigenous Navajo worked at a state of the art plant on the reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico producing chips from 1965-1975, receiving less than U.S. minimum wage. (2) Labour must be cheap in order for digital culture to exist. Though Moore's Law, which dictates that processor speed doubles every eighteen months, has been credited for the vast gains in computing power and miniaturisation that has enabled the transition to digital mobile sociality, offshore workers who make the devices at a competitive price are a crucial part of the economics of this shift. Digital labourers became newly visible in 2010 when eighteen workers, unable to continue working in untenable conditions, attempted suicide, resulting in fourteen deaths in one year at the massive Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China. (3) The idea of 'digital labour' is often associated with more highly paid, white, and male workers in the global North. As Gina Neff writes, however, these digital jobs are defined by precarity: 'YOYO' (you're on your own) economics, and the need for individuals to accept high levels of risk. (4) The software developers and workers she studied at start-up companies in Silicon Alley were expected to add their cheap or free labour to their paid labour by talking up their companies at key social events and trade shows, thereby blurring the line between paid work and play. She terms this 'venture labour' --workers willingly took up this burden because firstly, it didn't seem like a burden; self-interest was at the core of the motivation for contributing this kind of digital labour. As she writes, 'there is clearly a great degree of work involved in building and maintaining these regional economies, and this work is disproportionately done after hours by people who have the time, ability, and social capital to navigate such events (p160).' Neff shows that the business of software production is not only 'knowledge work,' but affective work as well. Clearly there are sharp differences between overworked female labourers in an electronics plant, precariously employed as software and game developers, and social media users who 'call out' and critique racism and misogyny online. They may all be labouring in the digital economy, but just as they are gendered and racialised differently, they are rewarded differently and under different conditions. David Hesmondhalgh says as much when he asks, 'are we really meant to see creating code or writing about favourite shows online as 'exploited' in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?' (5) Many of the 'venture labourers' that Neff writes about were white, male, and from middle class backgrounds, giving them a leg-up in the fend-for yourself-economy of software development work, while the mostly-female Asian assembly workers at Foxconn labour with no jackpot in sight. …

This article contributes to the scholarship of the gig labour process and gendered emotional labour and enriches the theorisation of emotional labour and alienation and Marxist feminist platform studies in transportation platforms. Focusing on Chinese female platform drivers' lived experience, this study conducts Chatnography and ‘chat’ interviews with 40 Chinese female Didi drivers, from November 2020 to June 2022. First, this article highlights how communication technologies and social reproduction processes complicate the emotional disciplinary process in China's ride‐hailing industry. Second, this study unveils the gender logic of emotional labour in China's transportation platforms, such that women's double identities as a platform driver and digital labour are intertwined in the gig labour process, resulting in the unprecedented human costs of gendered and sexualised emotional labour, such as self‐alienation and estrangement. Third, this study argues that the transmutation of emotion is an incomplete, antagonistic, and contradictory process in China's ride‐hailing industry. On the one hand, women worker's consciousness is contextualised in the social reproduction process. Care activities for children create an antagonistic force to combat gendered emotional labour on ride‐hailing platforms. On the other hand, the affordances of communication technologies energise individual and collective resistance to gendered and sexualised emotional labour.

A growing number of people are relying on technologies like Google Maps not only to navigate and locate themselves in cartographic space but also to search, discover and evaluate urban places. While the spatial data that underlies such technology frequently appears as a combination of Google-created maps and locational information passively collected from mobile (GPS-enabled) devices, in this article we argue that for such systems to function as both useful tools for exploration for users and sources of revenue, users must actively produce massive quantities of granular spatial data that would otherwise be significantly more difficult and expensive to collect. The production of this qualitative information about places constitutes significant unremunerated affective labour. In this article, we build on the tradition of feminist geographies, especially feminist and critical Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to examine how the labour done by gendered, raced and often classed members of a local community is alienated by Google (i.e. Alphabet, Inc.) to produce commodified spatial data/media in the Local Guides platform. We analyse how Google’s presentation of the platform hails women as care labourers—sharing their thoughts, feelings and knowledge of place for free in the name of supporting and caring for a community, however vaguely it may be constituted. At the same time, we argue that digital labour that produces the Local Guides platform draws from and reproduces specific gendering of spaces. We draw on a case study of a commercial corridor in the US city of Worcester, Massachusetts to show how the dialectic between affective digital labour and urban space has material effects on the production of raced, classed and gendered spaces and places. The article concludes with a call to maintain critical, feminist engagements with these types of platforms in order to further develop forms of digital praxis towards more just cities.

Despite the transformative benefits of platform technology for cultural production, critical scholars have raised vigilance against the emergence of digital platforms as a new hegemonic constellation of 21st-century capitalism, and the neoliberal governance and exploitation of labor that concomitantly intensify. Taking as a case study, the platformization of the “Webtoon” industry in South Korea, this article addresses such concerns, questioning the potentially detrimental effects of platforms on creative labor and their dominance in the market. More importantly, however, it commands wider attention to how platformization has been restructuring this particular cultural industry, and reveals that this process does not simply augment exploitation. Instead, focusing our analysis on the reconfiguration of the process of Webtoon production and the opportunities it affords for the creative labor, we illuminate the complication of relationship between the involved actors, and argue for a broader scope of inquiry that makes explicit the ramifications of platformization on cultural production.

On platforms, workplace rules can be ambiguous and inconsistently enforced. This article examines the labor process within the “grey zone” of platform governance, bridging theories of organizational misbehavior to research on digital labor. We compare two groups of content creators—porn creators and viral entertainers—who earn a living by sharing pictures and videos on social media. Both strategically utilize sexual imagery to boost their visibility and income. While platforms restrict explicit content, workers perceive blurred lines between what is allowed and what is not, and they look for ways to push those boundaries. Based on 94 interviews and ethnographic research, we identify a three-step process of strategic risk-taking. Creators edge against the rules, floodgate successful strategies, and recuperate after receiving sanctions. Ultimately, the “grey zone” allows workers to test and break rules, which ultimately benefits the platform by keeping both users and creators engaged. By conceptualizing platforms as grey zones, we connect the digital labor process to value production in the platform economy. Grey zones perpetuate the growth and interests of capital by keeping both users and creators engaged on the platforms.

Comment on Kemper's "Social Constructionist and Positivist Approaches to the Sociology of Emotions"

ABSTRACTThis study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Yokohama, Japan. To shed light on this workforce’s everyday experiences and labor subjectivity, this investigation draws ideas from recent research trends of “creative labor” from the field of media and cultural studies, sociology of work, and political economy of communication. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations, this research focuses on how the ethical and moral dimensions of labor subjectivity in creative work are prominently important in explaining Yokohama workers’ everyday living and working experiences as creative labor. Unexpectedly, this study found that these moral and ethical sentiments and actions, which take on the role of retaining their labor motivation, actually limit the development of political subjects who can resist given precarious working conditions and thereby hinder them from building a collective solidarity as “workers.” Thus this investigation concludes that the creative worker’s subjectivity retreats to solely a moral dimension rather than to a political one. Through this finding, this study explores whether the articulation of moral-political and social values in the course of cultural work can evolve from creative workers’ moral and ethical sensitivities and actions.

Informed by an ethnographic qualitative research study conducted with expatriate teachers of English in Saudi Arabia, we examine emotion(al) labor in the context of transnational mobilities with regards to cultural and institutional tensions. Engaged with wide-ranging interdisciplinary literature on emotion and affect, we discuss the place of transnational emotion(al) labor in four inter-related manifestations: (a) struggles and efforts to interact and communicate with students; (b) internalization and resentment of privilege and deficiency underlying discourses of native speakers; (c) responses to challenges from social, religious, and cultural difference; and (d) prolonged endurance, frustration, helplessness, and resistance to prescribed curriculum, testing, and top-down policy and practice. We also incorporate our reflections and emotion(al) labor as transnationally trained academics as we engage with the participants’ accounts. We show how our study could inspire dialogues with the self and conversations among researchers for support and solidarity beyond constructed boundaries of race, language, religion, ethnicity, and nationality.

Barada and Primorac offer a much-needed discussion on the social valuing of female creative labour. By drawing on empirical data on the cultural and creative sectors in Croatia, they show how the dictum that creative labour will be emancipatory for both women and men proved to be a techno-optimistic fallacy, since it encourages non-paid, underpaid, and self-exploitative practices, putting women in more precarious positions than men. Female creatives are facing the implosion of the public into the private sphere, while the social value of their work is decreasing. Technologies of creative labour contribute to contradictory practices that result in covert redomestication of female creatives. Faced with the feminization of their everyday life, female creatives find themselves trapped between a highly demanding profession and traditional gender roles. Labouring in the creative industries proves to be a golden cage for women.

Since the inception of recorded music there has been a need for standards and reliability across sound formats and listening environments. The role of the audio mastering engineer is prestigious and akin to a craft expert combining scientific knowledge, musical learning, manual precision and skill, and an awareness of cultural fashions and creative labour. With the advent of algorithms, big data and machine learning, loosely termed artificial intelligence in this creative sector, there is now the possibility of automating human audio mastering processes and radically disrupting mastering careers. The emergence of dedicated products and services in artificial intelligence-driven audio mastering poses profound questions for the future of the music industry, already having faced significant challenges due to the digitalization of music over the past decades. The research reports on qualitative and ethnographic inquiry with audio mastering engineers on the automation of their expertise and the potential for artificial intelligence to augment or replace aspects of their workflows. Investigating audio mastering engineers' awareness of artificial intelligence, the research probes the importance of criticality in their labour. The research identifies intuitive performance and critical listening as areas where human ingenuity and communication pose problems for simulation. Affective labour disrupts speculation of algorithmic domination by highlighting the pragmatic strategies available for humans to adapt and augment digital technologies.

Full-time mothers in China have increasingly turned to Douyin—China’s most influential short-video platform—as a space to showcase, narrate, and monetize their everyday caregiving practices. Drawing on a feminist political economy and affective labor framework, this study examines how mothers convert intimate domestic routines and emotional performances into public-facing digital commodities within China’s visibility-driven platform economy. While motherhood in China has traditionally been coded as private, unpaid, and morally valorized labor, Douyin introduces new economic possibilities through algorithm-driven exposure, influencer culture, and participatory audiences. Through a qualitative content analysis of 20 high-visibility Douyin accounts belonging to full-time mothers, this study reveals how care work, emotional warmth, maternal vulnerability, and “authentic” domestic routines become central currencies in the pursuit of attention, followers, and monetized partnerships. The findings show that affective labor—ranging from displays of patience and affection to curated depictions of exhaustion, self-sacrifice, and family intimacy—functions as a form of entrepreneurial visibility that enables mothers to reposition domestic labor as economically valuable. However, this monetization process is heavily shaped by platform logic: the algorithm prioritizes emotionally resonant content, viewers reward idealized maternal personas, and platform marketplaces commercialize family intimacy. As a result, full-time mothers must navigate a complex tension between empowerment and exploitation, authenticity and performance, agency and algorithmic pressure. This study argues that Douyin transforms motherhood into a public commodity, amplifies gendered expectations of care, and embeds affective labor within China’s rapidly expanding attention economy. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on digital labor, affective economies, and the gendered dynamics of platform capitalism.

Sportswomen, social media, and gendered affective labor: an analysis of two teams at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup