The book demonstrates how the power of affective labour might be harnessed for progressively oriented world-building projects, including what the authors term an ‘affective labour from below.’ By tying an analysis of affective labour into movements for social justice, the authors aim to produce a critical theory of the world that can be practically applied.
The book demonstrates how the power of affective labour might be harnessed for progressively oriented world-building projects, including what the authors term an ‘affective labour from below.’ By tying an analysis of affective labour into movements for social justice, the authors aim to produce a critical theory of the world that can be practically applied.
Affective Labour: (Dis) assembling Distance and Difference
240
Affective Labour: (Dis) assembling Distance and Difference
240eBook
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Overview
The book demonstrates how the power of affective labour might be harnessed for progressively oriented world-building projects, including what the authors term an ‘affective labour from below.’ By tying an analysis of affective labour into movements for social justice, the authors aim to produce a critical theory of the world that can be practically applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483914 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jennifer G. Correa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin.
Read an Excerpt
Affective Labour
(Dis)assembling Distance and Difference
By James M. Thomas, Jennifer G. Correa
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 James S. Thomas and Jennifer CorreaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-391-4
CHAPTER 1
The Production of Good Times in Urban Nightlife
Nightlife has long been of interest to scholars and critics of culture. Within the existing literature, however, nightlife is overwhelmingly presented as either a third-space critical for the sustainment of civic engagement and participatory democracy, or as a space where micro-articulations of social ills, including racism, classism, sexism and heteronormativity, are refashioned and reconfigured. Scholars have argued, for example, that bars, restaurants, cafes and other nightlife establishments operate as 'social levelers,' temporarily rendering social differences among patrons irrelevant. In his classic work on urban public space, Ray Oldenburg describes this space, including nightlife, as opposing 'the tendency to be restrictive in the enjoyment of others by being open to all and by laying emphasis on qualities not confined to status distinctions.' This is, of course, similar to the more recent work by Elijah Anderson on 'cosmopolitan canopies': public spaces, including restaurants, bars and nightclubs, 'that offer a respite from the lingering tensions of urban life and an opportunity for diverse people to come together ... engage one another in a spirit of civility, or even comity and goodwill.' Sociologist Tammy Anderson, in her study of urban rave scenes, also characterizes these scenes as sites where openness and inclusivity are fostered, and diversity, equality and community are valued. Painted in this light, urban public spaces, including nightlife, are 'good' spaces, where participants have structured opportunities to engage one another in a variety of topics, thereby improving civil discourse, civic engagement and social relations.
Other scholars take a more critical perspective to urban nightlife in order to show how nightlife districts manufacture and impose racial and classed rule that restricts access and participation for members of racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups. In his most recent book, sociologist Reuben May argues nightlife is best characterized by integrated segregation: though participants may ostensibly be open to the idea of sharing space with persons unlike themselves, the norms of race, class and culture prevail within urban nightlife and structure individuals' interactions in such a way that 'rather than experiencing unfettered interaction with others on the downtown streets, [people] are socially bound to interaction with those social types like themselves.' Dress codes, common throughout a variety of urban nightlife districts, often target the cultural fashions of black and working-class youth. As methods of social control, dress codes work to block racial and ethnic minorities, as well as working-class youth, from participating in 'spirit of civility' of these scenes.
Growing up in the 49/63 neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri, JT remembers vividly the restrictions that curfew and dress placed upon nightlife participants in Kansas City's popular Westport nightlife district. From 1999 to 2004, Westport area bar and nightclub owners, in conjunction with local law enforcement and the city council, attempted constructing barricades around the entrances to the nightlife district on Friday and Saturday nights. Later, they instituted curfews for summer weekends, and even floated the idea of charging a fee simply to enter the public space. By 2011, the city council, under the pretense of reducing swelling homicide rates, passed a curfew law that barred anyone under the age of eighteen not only from Westport, but from four other entertainment districts in the Kansas City metro area. From May through September, all youth under the age of eighteen had a curfew of 9:00 p.m. Though the Mayor's office focused on the relationship between teenagers and the growing homicide rates, critics noted that the areas in which the curfew was being enforced were not the sites where most homicides were occurring. On Friday and Saturday nights, police officers were stationed at its entrances.
While the city's curfew was seen by many as targeting the working-class, black and brown youth who lived in the Westport neighborhood, local nightlife establishments were free to institute their own set of rules for entry into their establishments. Most of these rules revolved around dress codes. Like other scholars have noted, dress codes in urban nightlife districts target the cultural fashions of working-class racial and ethnic minority youth. In Westport, it was no different. Many establishments had explicit bans on athletic apparel, plain white t-shirts, and loose fitting (i.e., baggy) clothing. Even some of the late night coffee houses and dining establishments had dress codes. As the local cultural and style magazine, The Pitch, wrote, Westport was aiming to be 'something like the more gentrified parts of Brooklyn: smart, artisanal, local. And any resemblance is intentional [emphasis ours].' In Kansas City's Westport nightlife district, even if you could access the public space of nightlife, you were not guaranteed access to nightlife places.
Though how race and class are policed within urban nightlife restricts participation for nonwhites and those unable to perform middle-class aesthetics, nightlife is also a highly gendered and heteronormative production. Historically, nightlife has served as an important site for economic transactions among men, with women serving as social and symbolic commodities. The historian and cultural critic Jane Rendell has argued that within contemporary nightlife, 'men organize and display their activities of exchange and consumption, including the desiring, choosing, purchasing, and consuming of female commodities, for others to look at in public space.' In James Spradley and Brenda Mann's classic The Cocktail Waitress, for example, these anthropologists show how women who work within nightlife venues are often encouraged to perform a hyper-femininity intended to communicate their sexual readiness for men who frequent these establishments. Additionally, however, these performances of hyper-femininity are also intended to communicate sexual availability for their male coworkers. The result is that even the sexual availability of women frequenting these establishments as customers is colored by how men perceive the women who work within them.
Spradley and Mann's findings help illuminate what Lauren Berlant and Michael Werner characterized as the mundanity of practical heterosexuality in everyday life. For Berlant and Werner, practical heterosexuality describes the production and distribution of heteronormativity through everyday habits and actions that, while not sexual, nevertheless center on the idea of heterosexual sex. The waitress that carries a tray of shots around a nightclub is not performing a sexual act, yet her actions, coupled with her style of dress (often mandated by club ownership), are intended to produce and circulate an idea of heterosexuality — her availability, her readiness, the idea that buying a shot might afford you something else more than the shot — that is practical in how Berlin and Werner define it. So engrained is practical heterosexuality within urban nightlife that most participants do not bat an eye at the site of scantily clad women serving them drinks, or the gendered division of labor within most establishments.
While all of these analyses are correct in their identification of practices meant to further crystallize, or articulate, hegemonic constructions of difference and distance, it is important to recognize that practical heterosexuality, elite classism and racial rule work in tandem to produce social life. Hyperfemininity, for example, is always racially coded because, as we show later in the chapter, nonwhite women are discursively constructed as the 'wrong type' on a regular basis. Furthermore, to perform hyper-femininity is to perform middle-class tastes and fashions, particularly among white women, who, if unable, may be termed 'trash' or 'slut.' Taken as a whole, urban nightlife districts reflect a lack of inclusiveness across a range of embodied and enacted differences, despite the argument that, once inside, civility and community take place. Working-class corner bars and taverns, for example, are notoriously homogenous on the basis of class, race and ethnicity, regardless of whether they are located in a white or nonwhite neighborhood. Further, many bars and nightclubs where practical heterosexuality is a salient characteristic are unwelcoming places for queer-identified men and women.
That urban nightlife can be both social leveler and producer of racial, classed, gendered and heteronormative rule demonstrates the complexity of these sights, as well as the need for cultural and social theory to take more seriously the role of urban nightlife in the production and maintenance of social difference and distance. To do this, we adopt, with some modification, sociologist Michael Ian Borer's urban culturalist perspective to examine the dynamics of culture, space and power within urban nightlife. Briefly, Borer's approach '[investigates] the meanings and values implicit in everyday social practices and the organization and outcomes of explicit specialized institutions and methods for cultural production.' While there is room to analyze both what culture does to social actors and the places they inhabit, as well as how culture is practiced by individuals, few scholars to date actually situate themselves within the theoretical space between, examining how power, space and agency become tethered to one another, producing and contesting existing arrangements of power in the process. Within the nightlife district of Columbia, Missouri, where JT spent more than a year conducting fieldwork, collective meanings of 'good times' across nightlife venues were produced through, and maintained by, prevailing norms of race, class, gender and sexuality. What types of bodies were capable of producing and contributing to 'good times' within these venues was an important matter of consideration for all involved, including staff, management and nightlife purveyors.
In this chapter, we first attempt to establish desire as the sine qua non of urban nightlife, the affective regime through which all of urban nightlife is produced. Second, we locate this process of producing and circulating desire within the developing framework of affective labour from our introduction, and, through rich ethnographic description, seek to solidify and expand that framework. Finally, throughout this chapter we attempt to better link two important, yet divergent, veins of contemporary discourse on affective labour: the cultural production strand, exemplified in the work of Henry Jenkins, among others, and the political economy/immaterial labour strand, exemplified in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others. While we find Jenkins's emphasis on the production of shared feelings through meaningful human activity useful, we do not wish to divorce human activity from a larger context of the political economy. Urban nightlife is, at its core, a pleasure space, centred on the formation and reproduction of desire for the sake of profit. Consequently, how desire is produced often reinforces prevailing norms of race, class, gender and sexuality while nevertheless also creating and sustaining a collective sense of community, esteem and belonging for those who participate in urban nightlife.
Scholarship on urban nightlife, to date, overwhelmingly describes nightlife through moral lenses — it is either 'good' space for what it can do for civility and community, or it is 'bad' space for how it reinforces social norms and hegemonic rule. Neither of these positions, however, moves us toward a more useful theory that demonstrates how 'cosmopolitan canopies' can coexist with segregated, hyper-heteronormative marketplaces within the same affective economy. What we require, then, is a more descriptive theory of urban nightlife space: a theory that is ethnographically informed and focused on the intertwining of power, agency and space that (re)produces social relations and provides the material from which to enable the body's capacity to act and be acted upon.
URBAN NIGHTLIFE IN THE HEARTLAND OF AMERICA
Columbia, Missouri, is small-to medium-size city relative to the rest of the United States, with a population of more than 111,000 in 2013. Though not as large as major metropolitan areas like New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles, Columbia presents a strong case for analysis as an urban environment for at least two reasons: first, Columbia is bracketed by two major Midwestern metropolitan areas, Kansas City to its west, and St. Louis to its east. Combined, these two metropolitan cities contain more than 4.8 million residents. Because of Columbia's location, its reputation for strong higher education, growing informational technologies and health service employment sectors, and popular college sports teams, Columbia draws a significant number of residents from Kansas City and St. Louis for school, employment and tourism. According to data from the Bureau of the Census, between 1990 and 2010 Columbia's population grew by more than 150 percent, from just under 70,000 in 1990 to more than 108,000 to 2010. While education, employment and tourism are often analysed as separate spheres of urban economies and daily life, Columbia serves as a prime example of the need to consider these sectors as relational. Host to the flagship University of Missouri, a 1,200-plus acre campus with a student body of more than 35,000, and several nationally recognized schools and degree-granting programs, including medicine, law, business and journalism. Columbia serves as an important economic, cultural and social vehicle for the rest of Missouri, and the Midwest region of the United States.
The location of the flagship university, at the southern edge of the downtown business and shopping district, has created an economic, cultural and social scene reflective of college-aged adults and their interests. Columbia's downtown shopping and business area, the District, is approximately forty-three square blocks in size. While the university resides on its southern edge, at the northern edge is a smaller, commuter college that is part of a national for-profit higher education chain. Along the eastern edge of the District is a third, small liberal arts college, historically an all-women institution, but now co-ed. Because of the strong presence of institutions of higher education around its parameters, many of the shops, restaurants and other businesses reflect in their products and marketing strategies themes and motifs from the three schools. Several restaurants, for example, offer food and drinks named for the major university's sports teams and their rivals. Many of the bars and coffee shops display university and college-themed décor on windows and interior walls. It is fairly common to see sports calendars of the schools' athletic programs hanging on the inside of shops and restaurants, or taped to the windows facing passers-by. Floral shops offer special packages and promotions for fraternity and sorority 'marriage parties' — mixers involving one or more of the campus Greek fraternities and sororities. Live performance venues frequently offer special, student-discounted events and tickets.
Though relatively large in size, the District's high degree of walkability — including wide pedestrian paths, bicycle lanes, multiple traffic lights, and the relatively flat terrain — make it quite easy to stroll on foot. Overall, the District contains more than one hundred retail stores, more than seventy bars and restaurants, nearly a dozen nightclubs and lounges, and an average of three dozen live musical, comedic, dance and theatrical performances each week. As described in the 2013 Reference Guide for visitors
The District is a hip, active and artistic community. Whether it's coffee in the morning or martinis at midnight, the District's friendly and energetic vibe is up early and stays out late. The District's lively mix of historic architecture, sidewalk cafes and retail shops provide the perfect setting for a business meeting, lunch with a friend, or a night on the town.
We highlight this description of the District to note how different it is from contemporary scholarship on urban nightlife.
To date, most studies on urban nightlife — particularly in the social sciences — privilege bars and nightclubs as the sites where urban nightlife takes place. In his recent Urban Nightlife: Entertaining Race, Class, and Culture in Public Space, sociologist Reuben May analyses the nightlife of an American college town in northeast Georgia. Yet, May's focus is overwhelmingly on nightclubs, particularly those that cater to college students. While part of this choice can be attributed to the demographics of the city May studied, readers are left with an impression that downtown Northeast, the pseudonym of his field site, is simply a constellation of 'frat bars,' 'freshmen bars,' 'regular bars,' 'alternative bars' and 'dance clubs.' Nightlife, in this sense, is homogeneous, despite the intentions of scholars to paint it as varied and eclectic. While much of urban nightlife across the United States, and, we suspect, other parts of the world, contains a heavy dose of bars and nightclubs, they are not the only scene for purveyors of nightlife entertainment, nor are they categorically the same kind of nightlife entertainment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Affective Labour by James M. Thomas, Jennifer G. Correa. Copyright © 2016 James S. Thomas and Jennifer Correa. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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