Work under capitalist economies has primarily been understood in terms of alienation and exploitation. This focus, in part, derives from changes in the composition of labor since the early 1970s. Stagnant productivity growth has led to deindustrialization and most work is now performed in a vast and variegated service sector. With wages stagnant in the majority of these industries, employers have turned to inducements beyond the wage. Workers are expected not only to do their jobs, but to enjoy them.
Contemporary cultural production and criticism has tracked this shift. Whereas previous eras represented agrarian, manual, and industrial labor, there has recently been interest in various forms of interpersonal service work, both waged and unwaged. Marxist feminist work from the 1970s (Federici; Fortunati; Dalla Costa and James) has reemerged in discussions around socially reproductive labor. Arlie Hochshild’s The Managed Heart (1983) underpins discussions of emotional labor. Recent scholarship has also examined the role of pleasure in work and in not working through antiwork politics (Weeks; Berg). In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, antiwork politics have surfaced in journalistic accounts of work (Jaffe; Horgan), “Great Resignation” discourse, and increasing labor militancy.
To adequately explore work and pleasure across genres of literature and criticism (crime fiction, domestic fiction, office fiction) and of labor (sex work, service work, care work, temp work), the session will have four presenters. Papers represent new work from tenured, contingent, and graduate student scholars. Presenters will be limited to 12-minute papers to allow for nearly 30 minutes of discussion. Due to the relevance of this panel to working conditions in and beyond the academy, we expect a sizable audience and lively discussion.
John Macintosh’s “Revenge Fantasies and Permanent Temp Work in Halle Butler’s The New Me” essay examines one example of what he terms the permanent temp worker novel. He argues that characters in these novels vacillate between the belief that hard work will lead to a permanent position and a more canny understanding that permanent work itself is increasingly abject. He argues that Butler’s The New Me contrasts protagonist Millie’s good life fantasy that traditional employment will fix her personal, social, and work lives with increasingly violent fantasies of revenge. He concludes that these novels engage in a futile search for “permanence” that fall into nostalgia for a Fordist-era labor market rather than questioning the exploitation of work itself.
In “Narrating Care Work: Violence in Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby,” Joshua Gooch takes up the difficulties of narrating the pleasures and non-pleasures of waged care work, another form of precarious labor. He reads Slimani’s translated novel about the murder of two children by their nanny as a meditation on the enigma of violence and care work. He argues that the novel enlists readers as detectives in solving its care work crime. However, For Gooch the real question that Lullaby poses is: why is care work only of interest when it ends in violence?
Like Gooch, Annie Bares considers narrative possibilities for pleasure through the subversion of work in her paper, “The Expropriators are Expropriated?: Philanthropy and the Heist Genre in Aya de León’s Uptown Thief.” She analyzes how de León’s 2016 crime thriller proposes theft as an answer to nonprofit funding problems endemic to deindustrialization. She argues that the heist plot represents a radical alternative to social service provision as we know it by decoupling care from philanthropy, the state, and work itself. In doing so, Uptown Thief proffers a utopian, antiwork horizon for care.
Similarly, Matt Tierney’s “Soupçon of Sabotage” explores the critical and epistemological pleasures of sabotage where the latter is not just a tactic of resistance, but also an affective structure both of workplace solidarities and of antiwork. Tierney argues that to see sabotage as a creative practice is not to induce a grand idea of sabotage from the sum of singular acts, but instead to find its site and mode of integration into a politics and an economics of labor, art, and protest. Framed with terms drawn from W.F. Haug, Sylvia Wynter, Clyde Taylor, and James and Grace Lee Boggs, he locates workplace sabotage as a radically non-empiricist critique of commodity aesthetics, a post-aesthetic intervention into high-tech capitalism, and a devastating source of pleasure.