I ate dinner at the library, rode home, tried to begin work again and realised I couldn’t concentrate until I made a cake. A semolina syrup cake with orange blossom water and coconut milk, to be exact. Rather an experiment, but we shall see. (The coconut milk is in the cake, not the syrup.)
I’m working on a draft of my final thesis chapter, which is also a book chapter due very soon, and have had my head in gendered and postcolonial theorisations of affective labour all day. I’m reading some fantastic books on migration and gendered labour, such as Rhacel Parreñas’ Servants of Globalization, an ethnography of Filipino/a migrant women, most of whom do domestic work. On the other hand, Parreñas focuses on the familial and resistant practices of her informants outside of the workplace, and what I need right now is writing on gendered and racialised subjective relationships within workplaces. Never mind, it’s a great book and well worth the read.
Today in the Reserve shelves I also randomly found a really awesome critique of the political economy of Thai sex work, Thanh-Dam Truong’s Sex, Money and Morality. Truong talks a lot about women’s ‘emotional labour’ in the context of tourism. I’m not writing about sexwork, but I do draw a parallel between sexwork and the new Thai health tourism economy — this latter is a less explicity sexual economy, to be sure, but it still draws on the same repackaging of ‘traditional’ Thai femininity and requires workers to perform that traditional femininity. Truong’s marxist politics are spot-on, and it’s from 1990, predating any post-autonomist writing on affective labor. This feels like hitting the jackpot, just a little, as if the library was in a good mood and decided to give me a present. I should hang out in the library Reserve section more often.
as if the library was in a good mood and decided to give me a present
i like the notion of the library having moods and being somewhat cyborgian… now, just imagine what that present might be if you were in a GIANT CONCRETE TURKEY LIBRARY! :)
Comment by nix — June 24, 2008 @ 1:04 pm
—but I do draw a parallel between sexwork and the new Thai health tourism economy — this latter is a less explicity sexual economy, to be sure, but it still draws on the same repackaging of ‘traditional’ Thai femininity and requires workers to perform that traditional femininity—
this is interesting, and perhaps clarifies something i noticed recently on this side of the world. So, not so long ago, i got treated to a meal at a fancy thai restaurant in an upmarket Johannesburg Suburb. beyond the group of [local] waiters (dressed in trendy, loose fitting, black linen outfits) the restaurants staff included a group of young women dressed in tight ‘tradition’ dresses, whose work it seemed to be to go, table-to-table, offering patrons a massage - something like R50 for however many minutes. also the women were paid at the table after the massage (not on the bill and i remember wondering if they were paid anything by the restaurant beyond what they collected directly from patrons. but, at any rate, similar kinds of affective labour is not that uncommon here, and in fact the ‘repackaging’ of ‘African culture’ and the ‘traditional’ is a bread and butter of the local tourist industry. What set the thai restaurant encounter apart, i think, including the particular transactional form, was precisely the sense of something like a sexual economy, even if not explicit, that, as you say “draws on the same repackaging of ‘traditional’ Thai femininity and requires workers to perform that traditional femininity”. so i found all this somewhat odd in a restaurant, but now that you mention that there is something of a industry of this kind, perhaps the model was imported. i dunno. but thanks for this
Comment by dionysusstoned — June 24, 2008 @ 10:20 pm
Thanks Az, like I needed more books to read… ;)
I just read (well, skimmed) a book recently about the gendered division of emotional labor in law firms, it’s called Gender Trials, also pre-dates the aut- stuff on affective labor. That’d be a fun reading group, to compare that sort of thing to the immaterial labor whatsits.
Wish I had some cake… how did it turn out?
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — June 27, 2008 @ 6:27 am
Hey DS — it doesn’t surprise me at all that there are Thai restaurants with women doing massage in Jo’burg, traditional Thai massage is a pretty huge part of the tourist trade in Bangkok and resorts. And it certainly is a vaguely ’sexualised’ economy, if not explicitly sexual: part of the tourist’s ‘pleasure’ is that a very attractive women is ministering to them…
And hey, Nate! The cake turned out very delicious. Tangy and spongy. Gender Trials looks really interesting, I’ll look out for it; I find it pretty fascinating that people were talking about ‘emotional labor’ in a feminist context and that mutated into autono ‘affective labor’. I wonder how that came about, and how one influenced the other.
Comment by Az — June 27, 2008 @ 12:47 pm
dionysusstoned might be amused to know that someone just found this page by googling “thai massage joburg”… the snake eats it tail.
Comment by Az — July 23, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
Hey, a friend posted a link to your blog. Good luck with your project!
As a side note “Gender Schmender” is what caught my eye. The phrase reminds me of my early days as a brand new gender theorist on fire to engage, reason, challenge, and build community. There are still a lot of great posts and threads. You can find the old group through MySpace. It is 18+ so you have to sign in. We put that rating there so we wouldn’t get deleted for talking about sex and gender. The group has since gone quiet (haha, I didn’t know anything about communication or group facilitation at the time but, it was still a phenomenal experience that lasted 4 years.)
Comment by Amiko-Gabriel — November 10, 2010 @ 5:12 pm