The Comic Frame: The Affective Labor of Laughter and Inequalities

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-335
Author(s):  
Marcus Aldredge
Keyword(s):  
Affective Labor ◽  
Comic Frame

Livestreaming from the bedroom: Performing intimacy through domestic space on Twitch

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652097832
Author(s):  
Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg ◽  
Daniel Lark
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Form ◽  
Cultural Connotations

This article looks at the appearance of domestic spaces on the popular livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, with a focus on livestreams that appear to be shot in streamers’ bedrooms. Many Twitch streamers broadcast from their homes, making domestic space central to questions of placemaking for this rapidly growing digital media form. Within the home, bedrooms merit particular attention because they carry particular cultural connotations; they are associated with intimacy, embodiment, and erotics. Drawing from observations of gaming and nongaming streams, we map where bedrooms do and do not appear on Twitch. We locate the majority of bedrooms in categories that foreground connections between streamers and viewers, like Just Chatting, Music & Performing Arts, and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). By contrast, across a wide range of video game genres, bedrooms remain largely absent from gaming streams. The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.

The Erotic Family: Structures and Narratives of Milk Kinship in Premodern Japanese Tales

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sachi Schmidt-Hori
Keyword(s):  
Connective Tissue ◽  
Indirect Method ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
The Core ◽  
Premodern Japan ◽  
Wet Nurse

This essay proposes that “milk kinship,” which upper-class individuals in premodern Japan formed with their milk kin—a menoto (wet nurse) and a menotogo (foster sibling)—occupies the core of an institutionalized erotic fosterage. In this “menoto system,” the surrogate mother's lactating body and erotic-affective labor became the connective tissue to bind two interclass families, creating a symbiosis that fortified the existing sociopolitical power structures. Around the tenth century, many vernacular tales started to feature menoto characters. While a typical menoto is the protagonist's homely, asexual, motherly confidante, her derivative construct—the menotogo of the protagonist—is often cast in an erotic light. In the four texts examined in this essay, menotogo valorize their erotic agencies to benefit their charges through sexual-affective labor or through an indirect method. The latter entails the formation of a “love square” in which two menotogo become lovers and then help their respective charges do the same.

Engendering Charisma: k.d. lang and the Comic Frame

Intertexts ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Whalen
Keyword(s):  
Comic Frame

Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 470-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Hedrick
Keyword(s):  
Henry V ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Final Scene ◽  
The Dead

Shakespeare's Henry V explores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action. Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.

Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
Average Life Expectancy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

Caring for the Internet: Content Moderators and the Maintenance of Empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Lindsay Bartkowski
Keyword(s):  
Labor Relations ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Scholarly and journalistic investigations of content moderation have thoroughly documented its emotional impact on workers, but have yet to analyze moderation as care labor. Out of sight from U.S. and European consumers, content moderators are hired by third-party outsourcing firms primarily in the Philippines or India to remove offensive or violent content from internet platforms in order to preserve their profitability and users’ emotional well-being. Situating content moderation in the long history of domestic labor relations in the U.S., which were designed to support the expansion of imperial power, this essay proposes new ways of understanding the relationship between affective labor and the procedures of empire.

scholarly journals “Running the Numbers”: Modes of Microcelebrity Labor in Queer Women’s Self-Representation on Instagram and Vine

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511989400
Author(s):  
Stefanie Duguay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Prominent Component ◽  
Aesthetic Labor ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Microcelebrity, as a set of practices contributing to personalized self-branding, has become an increasingly prominent component of self-representation on social media platforms. While “influencers” who have built lucrative followings through microcelebrity give the appearance of having fun without much exertion, recent studies have uncovered multiple forms of labor involved in their practices of cultural production. In addition, scholars analyzing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) influencers highlight a tension between labor in service of self-commodification and the representation of sexual minorities. This article examines the microcelebrity labor of everyday queer women who aim to increase their social and economic capital by interweaving personal self-representations with entrepreneurial endeavors on Instagram and Vine. Through a close analysis of these platforms’ markets, governance, and infrastructures alongside interviews with queer female users of each platform, attention is given to both platform influences and participants’ experiences of promoting their jobs, side-gigs, hobbies, or passions alongside the rest of their lives. Findings identify three modes of labor specific to participants’ efforts to build a following: (1) intimate affective labor expended in sharing and managing personal disclosures; (2) developmental aesthetic labor as the acquisition and practice of technical skills and bodily displays to achieve a desired appearance or performance; (3) aspiring relational labor in attempts to forge relationships with established influencers or celebrities. Sexual identity was pivotal across these modes of labor, as it enhanced intimacy with followers, provided a niche audience for self-branding, conveyed authenticity through self-revelation, and established a common ground for forging relationships.

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