Sublime

Last, Hearn’s discussion of “self-branding,” in reality TV, directly challenges the assumption that affective labor is a creative activity or a vehicle for self-expression. It shows that while drawing from the emotions and personality of the workers, the selfhood performed is shaped by specific dictates and disciplinary structures, and the selling

Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working-class and globalized.

Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.

Feminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country. Whatever the core problems are for the people of that country must also be the core problems addressed by women, for we do not exist in a vacuum.

Compared with assembly-line work, “affective labor” may appear more creative, as workers must engage in a constant rearticulation or reinvention of their subjectivity, choose how much of their “selves” to give to the job, and mediate conflicting interests. But they must do so under the pressure of precarious labor conditions, an intense pace of wor

Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.