Bodily Labor Research Articles

Roving consumers of pleasure: at the conceptual intersection of sport tourism and sex tourism

ABSTRACT Mega sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup, Olympic Games and Super Bowl, are often constructed as corresponding sites of bodily tourism, with a shared motivation among some tourists to purchase and consume both commercialized sport and sex. This paper begins by deconstructing the ‘common sense’ connection between sport tourism and sex trafficking. It recognizes, however, that both sport and sex tourism are grounded in bodily consumption and conquest. That is, both sex and sport tourism rely on the commodification and consumption of the body as currency and fantasy, defined as a libidinal economy. As such, this paper explores the colonial systems of power that enable and perpetuate the commodification of colonized bodies at the intersection of sport tourism and sex tourism. The paper situates this intersection within the colonial matrix of power and the structural hierarchies maintained through the colonial framing of power, race, gender and sexuality. In this sense, tourism is defined as roving colonialism [Sykes, H. (2017). The sexual and gender politics of sport mega-events: Roving colonialism. New York, NY: Routledge]. Using the colonial matrix of power as a theoretical framework, then, we evaluate the libidinal economies of sport tourism and sex tourism and propose a conceptual understanding of bodily labor and exploitation at this unique intersection. By using this conceptual framework, this paper calls for further empirical study that explicitly evaluates the impact of corresponding systems of sport tourism and sex tourism simultaneously at play within national and international sporting events.

Performers as emotional artisans: Crafting displays in theatre and workload

In this article, we analyse the process of crafting emotional displays developed by performers in theatre work. The systematic approach to emotion regulation and management displayed in theatre provides a perfect lens for researching emotions in the workplace. This, in turn, provides the possibility of developing a toolkit to analyse a wide range of working experiences where emotions and bodily labour are an intrinsic part of the work. This research draws on a sample of 31 in-depth qualitative interviews with professional Spanish performers alongside ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in two theatre companies. We start by exploring the pathways and techniques adopted by performers to address emotional labour and emotional management in theatre work. Afterwards, focusing on the process of displaying emotions live on stage, we analyse the overlap between the performers’ own emotions and the emotions of the characters they portray, revisiting the limitations of the distinction between the notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ self in the workplace. Finally, we will turn our attention to the workload generated by emotional labour in theatre, trying to ascertain the main positive and negative outcomes for vocational performers with a working experience heavily focused on emotional labour while dealing with a context marked by precarity. We develop a better understanding of the constant desire to work despite the impossibility of making a living through the concept of emotional artisanship.

Who Owns Bogurar Doi? An Ethnography of Placemaking and Craftsmanship in Bangladesh

Through an ethnography of Bogurar doi, a sweetened fermented milk dessert distinctive to the northern region of Bangladesh, I propose to explore the politics of naming of a food item linked to a place, especially in a geography that has witnessed three historic redrawings of borders, forced migration, and the changing form of labor involved in doi-making. Instead of the narratives of continuity of craft traditions, I trace three significant “movements” (West 2022) that are integral to Bogurar doi: (1) a history of “local” breeds of cows is produced by confluences (Banerjee-Dube 2016), thereby challenging notions of territoriality and taste-making (Leong-Salobir, Ray, and Rohel 2016); (2) a history of labor integral to doi-making, that of Goalas/Ghoshs, evident in the fictional representation of undivided Bengal and legends associated with Bogurar doi; and (3) everyday narratives of “repetition” (Sennett 2008) that is inherent to bodily labor performed on milk to create this microbial product. These three movements show how placemaking evolves at the cusp of ecology and changing forms of caste and labor associated with the milk trade. Taken together, these three movements challenge the mythic notion of continuity and provide a much-needed reading of ruptures and a processual reading of decolonization of placemaking in food traditions.

Embodied philanthropy and Sir Captain Tom Moore's “Walk for the NHS”

AbstractRecent decades have witnessed growing popularity in embodied philanthropy, where participants undertake various types of publicly displayed bodily labour in support of their respective causes. The fundraising potential of such efforts reached extraordinary heights during Sir Captain Thomas Moore's “Walk for the National Health Service,” wherein the 99‐year‐old World War II veteran walked laps of his garden to raise funds during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Within less than a month “Captain Tom” raised over £30 million, the highest amount ever by an individual charity walker. To better understand the social and cultural drivers behind Moore's incredible popularity this article applies Julie Robert's theoretical framework of embodied philanthropy, exploring the multivalent semiotic potential that Moore radiated through his age, disability, military adornments, Yorkshire grit, and unfailingly positive, aphoristic style of speaking. During a time of global crisis, this distinct array of bodily affordances enabled Captain Tom to simultaneously serve as an honest broker, teacher, exemplar, rallying figure, and ultimately martyr. Such practices of sacrificial citizenship, however, raise troubling questions, particularly in relation to expectations that fellow citizens should likewise stoically uphold civic‐minded resilience during times of crisis. Furthermore, while the potential benefits can prove extraordinarily impactful, organizations should exercise care in too readily attaching themselves to particular causes, lest they become complicit in contentious agendas or even inadvertently mislead donors.

On violence, the everyday, and social reproduction: Agnes and Myanmar’s transition

ABSTRACT This article brings into conversation feminist political economy with critical studies in peace and conflict to examine how Myanmar’s transition is experienced though everyday gendered sites and with what consequences for women living in rural areas of the country, where lives are shaped as much by the actuality as the possibility of violence. The everyday is where these insecurities are felt, feared and negotiated. To illustrate this, I draw on the experiences of Agnes, a woman growing up within the context of prolonged conflict in rural Myanmar. I demonstrate how Agnes’s home, and her bodily labour and vulnerability, is at the locus of a gendered political economy (re)produced both within the home and at the national level. I show how the transition has for women like Agnes resulted in a continuation of insecurity, challenging the legitimacy of Myanmar’s neoliberal reform initiatives as a meaningful pathway towards sustainable peace and security.

Preliminary Practices: Bloody Knees, Calloused Palms, and the Transformative Nature of Women’s Labor

In this article, I explore the prostration accumulation portion of the Preliminary Practices of a specific group of Tibetan Buddhist women in Bongwa Mayma, a rural area of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province. I focus specifically on the nuns and lay women who utilize this set of teachings and practices. The Preliminary Practices not only initiate practitioners into a specific tradition (that of the Drikung Kagyu and more specifically the Amitabha practices of this lineage), but also more fundamentally into Vajrayāna Buddhism as it is practiced in contemporary Tibet. Although monks and male lay practitioners in this region also tend to perform the same Preliminary Practices, I focus specifically on women because of their unique relationship with bodily labor. I begin this article with a discussion of the domestic and economic labor practices of contemporary Tibetan women in rural Yushu, followed by an analysis of Preliminary Practices as understood through the Preliminary Practice text and oral commentaries utilized by all interviewees and interviews (collected from 2016–2020) with female practitioners about their motivations, experiences, and realizations during the Refuge and prostration accumulation portion of their Preliminary Practices. Women themselves view bodily labor as a productive and inevitable aspect of life. On the one hand, women state openly that their domestic duties impede upon their ability to achieve religious realization. On the other, they frequently extol the virtues of hard work, perseverance, patience, and fortitude that their lives of labor helped them to cultivate. Prostration is meant to embody the act of going for Refuge, of submitting oneself to the teachings of the Buddha, to the path of the dharma, and to the community of religious practitioners with whom they will study and grow. Prostrations are meant to embody the extreme difficulty of Refuge, to remove obscurations, to crush the ego, and to confirm a dedication to endure the hardships on the path to realization. Buddhist women, despite their ambiguous relationship with physical labor, see the physical pain of this process as a transformative experience that allows them a glimpse of the spaciousness of mind and freedom from attachment-filled desire promised in the teachings they receive.

Reading Michelangelo/Michelangelo Reading

This article begins by examining the unusual and significant motif of reading found in Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna (c.1497). Drawing on Neo-Platonic ideas of divine furor in poetry and prophecy, it attempts to connect Michelangelo’s depiction to his own growing interest in poetry, as a reader and, eventually, as a writer. It will suggest that Michelangelo’s engagement with claims about the inspired text shaped this depiction as he wrestled with the contrast between the words of the Tuscan poets and his own hesitant versifying. It will be shown that, while this painting is marked by a considerable originality in conception, it sits in distinct contrast to the laborious, derivative, and bodily nature of both Michelangelo’s early poetic experiments and also much of his later poetic production. This contrast between his poetic and artistic work was further inflected by the bodily labor associated with the visual arts and by the Neo-Platonic discourse of divine inspiration that excluded the visual artist. Turning to subsequent works such as the Pietà (1498–99) and the Sistine Chapel’s prophets and sibyls (after 1508), and contrasting these works with his less inspired poetical constructions, this article will chart Michelangelo’s evolving theoretical engagement with the role which labor and furor each played in his artistic production.

Men, Tattoos, and Catholic Devotion in Brooklyn

This article explores the religious lives of Catholic men in Brooklyn, particularly focusing on their tattoos of saints and Catholic objects. It argues that tattoos are much like devotional objects: they are votive and function like sacramentals. Like scapulars, medals, and rosaries, tattoos can be efficacious conduits for protection and materialize love of the saints and Virgin Mary. More, tattoos illuminate the devotional lives of lay men. Every July in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Italian-Americans celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Saint Paulinus, the patron saint of Nola, Italy. The central event of the feast is the Dance of the Giglio, a spectacular devotional ritual in which over one hundred men lift a seventy-foot-tall, four-ton devotional tower. In exploring tattoos of the giglio and other saints, this article argues that men’s devotion is relational—the saints are always inflected with their connections to mentors, fathers, friends, and kin. They enact devotion together through shared bodily labor. Tattoos materialize the very real and affectionate intergenerational bonds men form with each other in church and in religious ritual.

Toward a corporeal economy: Evaluating the Cambodian dancer's laboring body as commodity

In developing countries, the arts are one path out of poverty. Cambodia's traditional arts were nearly destroyed during the Khmer Rouge regime, which created extreme economic, cultural, and political instability. In subsequent years, the effort to reconstruct classical dance was seen as a vivid symbol of the country's vitality. Simultaneously, economic needs have increasingly commoditized the practice. This article explores how, in the context of performance, dance practitioners' bodies are transformed into both cultural symbols and commercial products. What are the material consequences that result from this intertwining of labor and product? Expanding on Loïc Wacquant's corporeal economy—the bodily labor that goes into preparation and performance—an analysis of the dancing body provides an opportunity to examine its valuation as it is increasingly commodified. Based on eighteen months of field research and more than 150 interviews, the article explores performer experiences in two settings. The Cambodian Cultural Village (Siem Reap) and the Children of Bassac Dance Troupe (Phnom Penh) offer contrasting cases of bodily economics. These sites demonstrate that a theory of corporeal economics can explain the decisions dance practitioners make regarding their investment of labor. They also reveal the degrees of control that dancers have over their bodily production.

Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850‒1900 by Jessica Hinchy

Reviewed by: Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850‒1900 by Jessica Hinchy Catriona Ellis Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850‒1900 By Jessica Hinchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Jessica Hinchy's book Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India considers the relationship between the colonial state and the transgender Hijra community. Since 2014 Hijras have been officially recognised as the third gender in India but in the nineteenth century were known to the British as a small community of eunuchs primarily identified by wearing female clothing and associated with public performance and blessings of fertility at weddings and births. Providing a history of this understudied group and its interactions with colonial officials in the North West Province in the late nineteenth century, Hinchy convincingly argues that the interest in Hijras was more than an eccentric colonial obsession with a group associated with deviant sexual behaviour. Rather a detailed study of the colonial "panic" surrounding Hijras provides a glimpse into the underlying fragility of colonial power (27), the ambiguities inherent in colonial attempts to classify and monitor Indian subjects, the ways in which "gender expression, sexual behaviours, domestic arrangements and intimate relationships were central to colonial governance" (20) and how this was played out in individual lives. In Part One Hinchy argues that Hijras came to be viewed by colonial officials in NWP as an inherently ungovernable population, conceptualised in terms of filth or contagion. This view was reinforced by the information provided by middle class Indian men such as Syed Ahmed Khan, reflecting both changing concerns about homosexuality and anxieties that "respectable" children were threatened with kidnapping and slavery. The incorporation of Hijras into Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 in NWP shows their association with criminal, deviant and mobile populations. Yet unlike other CT populations Hjiras were castrated and therefore insufficiently masculine, which categorised them as incapable of moral improvement through productive labour, showing the intersectionality of race with ideas about gender, sexuality and the body (98). As Hijras could therefore be neither assimilated nor recovered, Hinchy frames the colonial approach within Patrick Wolfe's "logics of elimination," drawing parallels with the settler colonies. The aim of legislation was the physical extirpation of the future Hijra community by prohibiting emasculation and by removing children from Hijras' households, and cultural extermination though policing dress and public performance. Methodologically Part Two is probably of most interest to the non-specialist. Hinchy weaves together microhistories with wide-ranging observations on the nature and implications of colonial governance, and the disjunction between the claimed power of legislation and the realities of its enforcement. Chapter Five provides a detailed analysis of colonial archival practices and the limitations within the collection and circulation of colonial record-keeping and intelligence gathering, highlighting the silences in the archive and the ways in which gaps themselves became evidence of criminality. More interestingly, Hinchy demonstrates that the colonial archive is "multivocal," formed through the participation and contributions of a wide number of individuals and networks of information within both Indian and British communities, reflecting multiple and contested narratives. This is used to good effect in Chapter Six, which is an account of Hijra life histories pieced together from fragments of biographies and individual lives. This detailed assessment reveals the wilful limitations of colonial understandings of Hijras' everyday life, showing their seasonal mobility and complicated household structures and emphasising that performance, begging and the badhai gifts received were only one aspect of economic life, with many engaging in agriculture and artisan crafts. It also highlights the centrality of discipleship lineages for the generational transfer of knowledge and the extent to which anxieties surrounding the corruption of innocent children vastly overstated the proportion of children living in Hijra households. Moving away from grand narratives of sexuality and gender in colonial rule, Part Three focuses on the everyday contingent interactions between colonial officials and Hijras. Chapters Seven and Eight highlight the difficulties faced by a wide range of competing medical, legal and penal officials who sought to make deviant bodies "legible" and controllable, in particular through policing their '"endered self-presentation' (clothes) and bodily labour (performance). Chapter Eight also...

Beach body work: Australian women’s experiences

This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women understand the beach as a mediated and surveilled space where their bodies are foregrounded. In this environment, there is an intersection of women’s knowledge of the popular constructions of the archetypal Australian beach body, real women’s bodies, and interviewees’ experiences of the beach as a place of shame and pride. As a means of managing this affective landscape participants detail a range of bodily strategies enacted prior to going to the beach and once at the beach. This bodily labour demonstrates that for Australian women the beach is a dynamic and complicated site of both leisure and labour.

The “Desecrated Mind” & Its Alternatives: Dante Rossetti and Political Economy

This essay reads Dante Rossetti’s poem “Jenny” (1848-70) alongside nineteenth-century political economy and Ruskin’s critique of that discourse in “Unto This Last” (1860). While Rossetti’s poem is almost exclusively discussed in relation to debates surrounding contemporary prostitution, this essay demonstrates the considerable extent to which “Jenny” articulates — and simultaneously critiques — of one of political economy’s central claims, that the labouring classes are mentally stultified by their repetitive bodily labour. Recognition of this fact opens up a way of reading Rossetti’s poem as a wholesale challenge to political economy and its patters of thought.

‘Enhance her pleasure – and your grip strength’: Men’s Health magazine and pseudo-reciprocal pleasure

This paper provides a snapshot of the Top Ten free, digital Men’s Health magazine articles, accessed on a randomly selected day, that can be viewed as a collection; both a product for readership consumption and a construct of readership priorities. Through close textual analysis, we examine how discourses about masculinity, heterosex and consumerism have intersected to create a model of masculinity based on the discipline of male pleasure, which impacts on men’s approach to female pleasure and gender dynamics. The analysis contributes to the developing research about the sexual and bodily discourses the magazine promotes and identifies a model of masculinity where men can ‘have their cake and eat it’; seeming to adhere to ideals of gender equality and reciprocity while retaining their traditional patriarchal position of producer/provider. They are encouraged to do so by approaching female orgasm as a product, which they can ‘purchase’ through adhering to Men’s Health magazine’s sexual advice and bodily labour at control, delay and discipline of their own pleasure and orgasm. We argue that this approach to sex disenfranchises men, and in turn their partners, of opportunities to access alternative models of embodied pleasure.

Bati as Bodily Labour: Rethinking Masculinity and Violence in Fiji

Violence has been considered a decisive factor throughout much of Fijian history, from pre-modern inter-tribal warfare via participation in the British Military in both world wars to the more recent events of active military intervention in civil matters. Underpinning this history is a more fundamental notion of the Fijian male warriors (bati) as the protectors of everything Fijian. This is epitomised through bati ideology, which continues to hold purchase in discourses about Fijian identity and social organisation. Although the nature of violent practices has changed considerably throughout modern history, notions of martial strength, power and manhood remain closely linked in Fijian social ideologies. Embedded in this social context, contemporary constructions of masculinity are often centred on stylised performances of physical strength. Equating these dynamics with a claim that Fijian masculinities are intrinsically violent is, however, problematic. By looking at boxing and rugby union as constitutive social practices in the constructions of contemporary Fijian masculinities, we draw upon the concept of bodily labour to discuss how Fijian men negotiate bati ideology in a modern context. Our key argument is that while bati ideology remains pervasive as a part of the hegemonic notion of masculinity in Fiji, it is not used to valorise or glorify uncontrolled violence.

Critical reflections and insights: Ethnographic participant observation, embodiment and gender in the mixed martial arts gym

Mixed martial arts (MMA) gyms and other sporting contexts are environments where practice is of paramount importance, and this is reflected in the ways in which gender plays out in these settings. In this paper the focus is on the intersection of gender and ethnographic participant observation. The main aim is to critically reflect on the value of the corporeal labour of the researcher, and her gendered positionality, in the research setting, including insights into gendered nuances within embodied ways of knowing MMA. The first part of the article focuses on demonstrating the value of insider status and practical involvement of the researcher in the MMA gym. This is followed by an introduction to the study from which the article draws from, a 12-month ethnographic study in two MMA gyms in the north-east of England. Subsequently, I highlight the different ways in which the dual role of the female researcher as MMA insider and as a gendered other in the male dominant setting of these two MMA gyms enabled collection of data in a way that is sensitive to the practical, corporeal realities of the practitioners and coaches and to the tacit gendered currents of ways of knowing MMA. The paper contributes to the developing body of research into sporting embodiment and methodological literature, seeking to make the influence of the bodily labour and gendered presence of the researcher more visible.

Dub Poetry as a Black Atlantic Body-Archive

Rereading dub poetry under the pressures of and with the resources of black feminist and queer theory, and treating the practice of dub poetry as a production of a sound archive, one that embodies and aurally animates the intimacies of the black Atlantic, this essay highlights the creative labor of this artistic project (the ways dub poets link sound to body to place to textuality) and helps us consider the conditions under which something new in black modernity is produced. Through this reconceptualization of the art form, the essay draws attention to ways dub extends Paul Gilroy's insights into the black Atlantic and the challenge of experiencing dub as a sound archive but also as a phenomenology that raises questions of embodiment and gendered bodily labor.

America’s Culture of Servitude at War: The Servant Problem, The Soldier Problem, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House and Home Papers

America’s Culture of Servitude at War:The Servant Problem, The Soldier Problem, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House and Home Papers Andrea Holliger (bio) Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House and Home Papers is a profoundly strange text. Comprised of a series of columns written for The Atlantic over a twelve-month period, the content of House and Home Papers seems unremarkable at first: every month a gentlemanly narrator expounds upon the principles and practicalities of domesticity, regularly using his family as reference and example. But quickly the critic’s questions begin to emerge: Why would Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the most famous women on either side of the Atlantic, choose a male narrative persona to discuss domesticity? And why would she make this narrative persona the by-line of each column, adopting the pseudonym, “Christopher Crowfield”? Perhaps most importantly, why would she do all of this in the middle of the Civil War? Stowe began writing in 1863, published the sketches from January to December of 1864, and republished them in a bound collection in early 1865. Many critics have felt that Stowe dealt with the war’s violence by turning away from it, but a closer examination reveals that House and Home Papers is deeply invested in the issues of the war. Although Christopher Crowfield barely mentions the ongoing conflict in his didactic discussions of interior decorating, child rearing, and servant managing, House and [End Page 37] Home Papers (HHP) is supersaturated by two themes undeniably pertinent to the war: the systematic production of unifying sentiment, and bodily labor. Furthermore, I will show that Stowe’s HHP responds directly to the Union’s recruitment and discipline struggles via the homologous discourse of domestic labor recruitment and discipline, particularly its discussion of household servants. Stowe’s answer to this problem is the systematization of household management, which will foster the production of a sentiment that disciplines a collectivity.1 Civil War correspondence reveals that Stowe’s suggestions were very much in line with what the Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau and the U.S. Sanitary Commission ultimately effected to combat things like desertion and disease. In both HHP and the Civil War archive, however, one sees that this collectivity is predicated upon a collective individuality. A collective individuality, in which the individual can be neither reduced to, nor separated from the collectivity, blurs the boundaries of the body, and suppresses the material effects of class upon that body in the interest of appropriating its labors. In John Brown’s Body, Franny Nudelman argues that Civil War discourse abstracts the individual body so as to foster a collectivity that perpetuates subordination to the state and its demand for more bodies.2 By extending Nudelman’s challenge to unmask the abstractions of power, Stowe’s text may be read as operating in a fashion similar to the discourse Nudelman explores. This collective individuality, I will argue, stems, in part, from the theories of class harmony and class cooperation with which nineteenth-century scholars are well-acquainted.3 The rebellious factors in Stowe’s text and the Civil War archive— be they troublesome servants, or draft dodgers—can be read as protesting this theory of class and its attendant collective individuality. As John Whiteclay Chambers writes, “draft resistance and evasion among such economic and cultural groups can perhaps be better understood not simply as personal avoidance of military service but also as a challenge by less affluent, more parochial segments of society to the [End Page 38] activist national policies that Republicans were employing to establish their particular interests and vision of America.”4 To find the seeds of emerging class resistance in a historical event like the New York City Draft Riots is hardly surprising. However, by contextualizing Stowe’s work among this and similar wartime events, it becomes surprisingly clear that narratives of servant rebellion—though isolated and ensconced within the domestic space—are likewise evidence of an emergent class resistance. By addressing military matters via domestic servitude, Stowe demonstrates that nineteenth-century discussions of servitude are a high-powered lens upon the articulations of power. Because the relationship between master/mistress and servant takes place in the home...

Flexibility and Its Bodily Limits: Transnational South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism

This article examines the conflicting and paradoxical ways in which race and citizenship intersect in late capitalism, and how dancers negotiate these contradictions through their bodily labor. Focusing on South Asian dancers in the UK, I suggest that transnational South Asian dancers have increasingly had to emphasize flexibility and mobility in their bodies and dance practices in order to gain access to mainstream funding, venues, audiences, resources, and touring circuits which have traditionally marginalized non-white dance practices. I argue that “flexible citizenship” is not just a political strategy to negotiate capital; it is also a bodily tactic and an embodied response to the racialization of labor in neoliberal economies. However, there are limits to how far the flexibility of flexible citizenship can stretch. Although the creativity of South Asian dancers and the strength of their bodily practices has helped them to negotiate racial inequalities in Britain, immigration laws, arts funding policies, and employment regulations have immobilized dancers. Addressing the various complexities and contradictions in which transnational bodies are embroiled, this essay is both a tribute to the creative, flexible practices of South Asian dancers as well as an acknowledgment of the limits of flexible citizenship and a critique of neoliberalism's toll on the racialized dancing body.

Exaggerated Femininity and Tortured Masculinity: Embodying Gender in the Horseracing Industry

Most of the young people enrolling on modern apprenticeships in the horse racing industry are women and many hope to become jockeys. The majority of those who realise these ambitions are, however, men. This paper explores this process of attrition, focussing on gendered embodiment and its relation to the development of the bodily hexis and habitus characteristic of the racing field. We argue that women engage in the bodily labour of engenderment in a context of hostility and harassment and that they develop a contradictorily gendered habitus which brings together attributes which are culturally associated with both masculinity and femininity. In order to achieve this they subject themselves to a disciplining and punishing of the body which creates a ‘tortured’ masculinity. Female bodies are, however, ‘imprisoned’ by the workings of the habitus and, within the racing field, their bodies are read as weak, not fit for hard work and as more suited to an office (or home) than a race horse. These embodied processes and practices place them at a severe disadvantage and result in women being a very small minority of jockeys.

Self for Sale: Notes on the Work of Hollywood Talent Managers

AbstractBased upon fieldwork data that the author collected while pursuing an internship at a Hollywood talent management company, this paper examines how Hollywood talent managers must sell themselves in order to sell the actors that they represent. In this marketplace where actors become commodities traded by their managers in exchange for ten percent of their film and television salaries, what is “made to matter” (Butler 1993) is not only the image of the actor, but also the appearances of the individuals who represent them. At the talent management firm in question—which represents about sixty male and female actors, a handful of whom are immediately recognizable names and faces among the American public—the talent managers and assistants invest a significant amount of capital in maintaining immaculately groomed, well‐heeled appearances, while at the same time performing a convivial, and at times even unctuous, persona in their relations with the professionals who cast film and television roles. The physical and social self becomes, in other words, a necessary and high‐stake investment in the talent management industry, which ends up demanding emotional labor, “bodily labor” (Shilling 2005) focused on one's appearance, and the labor of “networking” that entails a merger of business affairs and one's leisurely, domestic or even romantic social relations. In this scenario, the commodification of others therefore requires one's own objectification, so that “an agent"—or a talent manager—"who does not participate in the dialectic of control, in a minimal fashion, ceases to be an agent” (Giddens 1979: 149).