This special session explores the materiality of feeling in cultures of restructured labor by examining its life in novels, new media, and television. In the wake of drastic shifts in structures of employment marking the decades after the collapse of postwar boom (and, more recently, the financial crisis of 2008), opportunities for the commodification of affect abound: as management technique, as metric of productivity, as personal branding. Yet, it is a curious feature of a work like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s widely-cited “Affective Labor” (1999), which has dominated many scholarly accounts of deindustrialized work, that it is most interested in the intangibility of “immaterial” forms of work—their disjunction from any concrete product—than about the human, decidedly material cost of value production in the restructured economy. This session proposes that attending to representations of feeling in the scene of work returns our attention to the materiality of affective labor, which inheres not only in what is produced but also, crucially, in who produces it: the laborer whose work is defined by and managed as embodied experience.

Taking up Simon Gikandi’s call to consider the human in the “late industrial” workplace in order to imagine “more humane spaces of working,” this session theorizes the commercialization of affect under deindustrialization as key to understanding the politics of new and newly dominant forms of work. It analyzes corporate strategies for managing human resources—from "sensitivity training" to the descriptive rating system used to evaluate Lyft drivers—that situate affective stances as professional knowledge to be taught, learned, and measured. It also examines the ways in which contemporary cultural objects manage and mediate affective experience, interpolating audiences as affective laborers. Inspired by accounts of post-industrial labor from influential texts like Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy (2014), Jasper Bernes’s The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017) as well as the recent Post45 special issue “Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work,” this panel approaches popular and industrial conceptions of affect as capital through their materially—that is, institutionally, technologically, culturally, and corporeally—situated practices. We ask: How does studying affect in contemporary imaginaries of work both refine our understanding of contemporary work and historicize our understanding of affect? How have familiar and emergent narrative forms explored the nature of feeling on the job?

Our panel features three papers from emergent scholars, each of which will require around fifteen minutes to present. With our presider performing introductions, this leaves ample time for Q&A.

Deborah Thurman will begin by analyzing sensitivity as a form of affective labor explicitly cultivated in institutional contexts. The professionalization of sensitivity offers an illuminating case study in the emergence of new structures of feeling under changing historical conditions, including the convergence of deindustrialization with new labor laws pertaining to discrimination and harassment. Her paper reads Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) in dialogue with the development of sensitivity training as a postwar innovation and preoccupation. Examining Adichie’s depictions of sensitivity work alongside the novel’s formal didacticism, Thurman outlines the connection between the work the novel describes and the work it accomplishes, theorizing the role of the literary as a mediator within institutional systems of affective labor. This opening case study provides the panel with a grounding example of affect’s explicit incorporation into the workplace, as well as its direct relationship to literary work.

Michelle Chihara will follow with a paper that puts narrativization of affective labor in conversation with new technologies of work. Reading technological interventions into the marketplace as cultural phenomena, Chihara asks how questions of agency and voice shape not only representations of work but labor practices themselves. She argues that apps work primarily to re-describe labor practices: within discourses of “human-centered design,” apps and their IPOs tell stories more than they invent or apply digital technologies. Chihara explores how companies like Hello Alfred (which provides domestic helpers) and Lyft re-narrate the experiences of contingent and poor workers as situations of utopian promise, adapting new narratives to old jobs that have been long been performed by laborers from vulnerable and/or migrant groups. These companies secure capital by presenting themselves as neoliberal-feminist, post-racial and “human-centered,” making claims about clients’ work-life balance but also about workers’ satisfaction and class position. The apps’ appeal depends on the gendered and raced narratives they circulate, which re-present services to clients and re-structure workers’ relationships to their own time, to clients, and to assets.

Shirl Yang’s paper will explore the popular imaginary surrounding temporary work by turning to its representation in a familiar genre: the “summer job” comedy. Focusing on the Amazon series Red Oaks (2014-2017)—a nostalgic callback to eighties hits like Caddyshack and Dirty Dancing that follows its protagonist over several summers working at a country club—Yang asks: what about the summer job comedy is conducive to nostalgia, a feeling of unlaboredness at odds with the work happening onscreen? Situating Red Oaks and its antecedents within a history of temporary labor’s popular representation, Yang reads comedic treatments of seasonal employment—which rarely register the affective labor involved in facilitating recreation for others but, instead, feature young, white, bored protagonists finding endless time to pursue side plots—alongside the more sobering reality of the contemporary gig economy. Reframing nostalgia as an affective relation to temporary employment, Yang explores this fantasy of leisure at work—the fantasy of untaxing affective labor—as a telling study in what Annie McClanahan calls the presentation of gigwork as a “salutary” alternative to formal employment, concluding the panel by adding the materiality of fantasy to the institutional and technological contexts the previous papers address.

While the sites and styles of affective labor are manifold, these three papers offer varied and interlocking accounts of feeling on the job—in the racially diverse corporate workplace, the ever-shifting world of flex labor, and the temporary setting of seasonal employment. Together, they demonstrate how contemporary narratives about labor shape and elucidate labor practices, confronting the embodied experiences of humans at work.