Women’s Work, Precarity, and Cultural Labor, or the Affective Economy of the Assistant

Abstract

Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and crystallised category of exploitation and of the worker in the contemporary chain of value extraction. Indeed, since the neoliberal paradigm is often described as a regime shattering any distinction between life and work, such a productive dimension involves tackling subjectivity at the intersection of class, race, gender, ability/disability. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent The Assistant (2019) by Kitty Green, which, because of its melancholic and disempowering affective patterns, embodies a fascinating critical potential in reversing mythologies and imaginative traps related to dreams of individualised self-entrepreneurship. The film allows us to discuss these same intertwined levels by observing the emotional economy entailed in cultural work and how much this ecology can be connected with more general coordinates and strategies of feminisation and extraction of care-related activities.