John MacIntosh

Abstract:

The concept of emotional labour pervades recent popular discourse. However, this discourse tends to emphasize the unpaid work performed in personal and familial relationships. This erases Arlie Russell Hochschild’s distinction between emotion work and emotional labour, the latter of which is a waged ‘management of feeling’ that ‘create[s] a publicly observable facial and bodily display’. This focus on unwaged emotion work identifies a real site of exploitation, but tends to obscure the recent historical tendency of care work to be subsumed increasingly into new forms of low-waged labour. I examine this tendency by turning to Catherine Lacey’s speculative novel The Answers (2017), which follows an indebted young woman, Mary, who takes a contract job in an experiment run by a celebrity seeking love. Alongside ‘girlfriends’ with other intimate roles, Mary is paid to be an ‘Emotional Girlfriend.’ I argue that the novel’s thought experiment of splitting the various roles of a romantic partner into separate, waged jobs not only commodifies affective labour, but also replicates the process of industrial deskilling in its depiction of the real subsumption of affective work into the service sectors. Next, I discuss the role of the experiment’s Research Division, which not only monitors experimental subjects via cameras, sensors, and interviews, but also directly influences their behaviour using ‘internal directives’, or chemical instructions that biologically optimize emotion. I argue that these directives intensify the management of feeling to make working subjects’ emotions more productive for capital. The argument concludes that The Answers updates Hochschild’s theory to account for work that is now often less secure, but fails to address the political questions it raises.

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid is no stranger to the elite pools from which US investment banks and management consulting firms draw their entry-level analysts. After studying creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, Hamid earned a law degree at Harvard and joined McKinsey & Company, the leading consulting firm. Although Hamid "had his pick of investment-banking job offers when he graduated in 1996. He picked McKinsey instead, attracted by the more creative atmosphere" (Thomas, Jr.). While working at the firm, Hamid published his well-received debut novel Moth Smoke (2000), which centers on a mid-level banker in Lahore caught in a downward spiral. However, it was Hamid's second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) that catapulted him into global fame. An international commercial and critical success, the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted, somewhat unfaithfully, into a feature film. The novel is narrated by Changez, a Princeton-educated Pakistani valuation analyst who abandons his career in the US, returns to Lahore as a university lecturer in finance, and becomes an anti-imperialist activist. The novel's frame narration depicts a conversation between Changez and an unnamed American stranger at a café in the Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore. However, the novel only presents Changez's perspective and does not directly represent the responses of the American, whom he intimates may be a CIA assassin. Changez narrates in a direct address and has sole narrative control.

Summary

Since the rise of the novel, authors have endeavored to represent work. Yet work has been a long-standing representational problem in fiction. Elaine Scarry asks, how does one represent discretely an action that is characterized by its ongoing and repetitive nature? How does one craft engaging plots around the tedium of work? Why would readers want to read about toil during their own respite from it? Even when an occupation serves as shorthand for character or the workplace serves as a central setting, the representation of work itself is only seldom the focus of fictional narrative. Since 1980, an additional representational problem seems to appear. If US fiction concerned with work and labor previously tended to focus on agrarian, manual, and industrial labor, how does it represent work in an era in which the service industries dominate the labor market? Where are work and labor to be found in contemporary fiction? This entry opens with a brief survey of the economic conditions of this period and their effects on working life. It then examines the sectors of the labor market that are most legible in US fiction since 1980: fictions of deindustrialization; office fictions of the downwardly mobile middle class; fictions of the now dominant interactive service industries; fictions of immigration and migration that respond to the transnational movement of labor; and, finally, fictions of tech start-ups and the gig economy that have recently emerged. It concludes that while the representational problem remains, the themes of work and labor endure.

A review of Amin Samman's History in Financial Times, which examines the historiography of financial crisis.

A review of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, edited by Matt Seybold and Michelle Chihara, that examines the vexed relationship between these two disciplines.

Pitching potential articles to Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham over "a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place," Ehrenreich recalls the conversation shifting to how "women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform [were] going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour" (1). (1) Ehrenreich suggests that '"[s]omeone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism--you know, go out there and try it for themselves.' I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands" (1-2). When Lapham insists that she investigate low-wage work herself, Ehrenreich admits misgivings about doing work she is positioned to avoid. Citing her successful career despite having grown up not far removed from "the low-wage way of life," Ehrenreich values her "gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life" (2). Although she eventually agrees to take the assignment, Ehrenreich's ambivalence marks the difference between work as a writer and work as a service worker manipulating affect for a wage.

ervice work now dominates the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that 81 percent of all U.S. employment by 2026 will be in services. While the service work sector includes jobs with a wide range of educational attainment, training, perceived prestige, and remuneration, most of the new jobs are non-unionized, have little potential for productivity- or wage-growth, and are resistant to automation.1The typical worker in these positions works part-time in one or more jobs for low wages, often under degraded conditions, and without benefits. Disproportionately staffed by women and people of color, these jobs are in retail, home healthcare, hospitality, food service, and other jobs not seen as "real" work. Service workers pushed into this ever-expanding category comprise a massive, but fragmented proletariat